Re: cstring hash

From:
brangdonj@googlemail.com (Dave Harris)
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.c++.moderated
Date:
Wed, 7 Aug 2013 21:27:13 CST
Message-ID:
<memo.20130807225151.22516A@brangdon.cix.co.uk>
In article <ktp3k6$kel$1@usenet.stanford.edu>, musiphil@bawi.org
(Seungbeom Kim) wrote:

Aren't we talking about the raw pointer of type 'const char *'
for T in std::unordered_set<T> or for K or V in
std::unordered_map<K, V>?


We're talking about wanting to hash (const char *) so they can
be used as keys, yes.

It's a reasonable assumption that if you put allocated strings in
such a container, it will be quite hard to make exception-safe
for all cases.


Why? What is wrong with (for example):

    void set( const char *key, int value ) {
        auto len = strlen( str ) + 1;
        auto p = make_unique<char>( len );
        strcpy( p.get(), str );
        g_vec.push_back( move(p) );
        g_map[ vec.back().get() ] = value;
    }

where g_vec is responsible for deleting the strings, and g_map for
the indexing.

Using a unique_ptr<const char *> as the key for the unordered map
might be simpler, but we'd still need a way to hash all the
characters of the string. std::hash<std::unique_ptr<const char *>>()
will not do that. Similarly if we had our own string class, we'd
need to write a hash function for that. If the standard library
provided cstr_hash as the original poster suggested, it would be
useful in these situations.

-- Dave Harris, Nottingham, UK.

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