Topic awaiting preservation: short alphanumeric hash

hello, i am looking for a php function that generates a very short alphanumeric hash out of a string.

one that is similar to those tinyurls, example:
http://www.tinyurl.com/qmm52f

the md5 function which comes with php is way too long for me.

thanks!

you can just take a part of the md5 if you want something quick ... but if you're doing something similar to tinyurl then the only way to ensure that all the hashes are unique would be to start with 0 and iterate then convert the number to base32 or 64

so what are you doing exactly and what are your requirements for this hash?

edit: didn't think of this before: http://php.net/manual/en/function.crc32.php

(Edited by Arthurio on 06-06-2009 17:49)

thanks!

the base32 encoding sounds interesting. is there a php function for that? thanks!

try if echo base_convert(12345, 10, 32); works ... i'm in a hurry now, I can look into it later

Tinyurl and the likes don't actually hash the URL but increments an index and display in some sort of base #number_of_valid_URL_characters. IIRC there are 69 standards ASCII characters that are valid URL characters and don't require encoding. Therefore they simply do :

function getHash( index )
{
  var valiCharacters = 'abcdefghi09832';
  var mod = valiCharacters.length;
  var hash = '';
  var tmp = index;
 
  while( tmp>mod )
  {
    hash+= validCharacters[ tmp%mod ];
    tmp = Math.flood( tmp/mod );
  }
  return hash;
}

Preceded by a lookup to see if the URL has already been remapped to a hash.

I tried crc32 before, but was worried by the possible collision. One thing I often do when I need a simple and relatively short UID without storing any sort of counter is use the current timestamp in base32.

HTH

yeah thanks for the infos! i went with base32 in the end.