Thomas Jollans wrote: > Robin Becker wrote: ....... >> I'm not sure my postscript is really good enough to do the latter so I >> hoped to pursue a python based approach which has a low probability of >> busting. Originally I thought the range was a 16bit number which is why >> I started with 16bit hashes. > > > For identifying something, I suggest you use a hash function like sha1 > truncating it to as much as you can use, similarly to what Jon Ribbens > suggested.
that is in fact what I'm doing; my function looks like this 4000000+(reduce(operator.xor,struct.unpack('i'*4,md5.md5(s).digest()))&0x3ffff) whether it's any better than using the lowest bits I have no real idea. I suppose (sha being flavour of the month) I should really use 4000000+(reduce(operator.xor,struct.unpack('i'*5,sha.sha(s).digest()))&0x3ffff) -- Robin Becker -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list