Names to ids

[Dirk Koopman]

On Wed, 2006-01-25 at 13:40 +0000, Simon Wistow wrote:
> I need to turna filename into a numeric id in a repeatable manner (i.e 
> the same filename must always produce the same number).  
> 
> My first thought (md5_hex the name and then hex the reuslt to get an 
> integer) gets an overflow error unless I truncate to the first 8 
> characters.
> 

If you are prepared to cope with the occasional collision:

my $id = unpack "%32C", $name;

which is a simple checksum, or if that is too simple try:

my $crc = new Digest::CRC32();
$id = $crc->strcrc32($name);

Dirk