Scalabium Software

#136:ELF hash algorithm

Sometime ago I posted a code for hash calculation of strings (CRC32 and easy method which is extracted from VCL sources). Today I want to post a code for ELF algorithm which allow to receive a strong distributed hash from string. This algorithm is very popular because can be implemented in any programming language (from VB to Java) and is a very-very fast (contain one easy loop only).

See a code below:

function ElfHash(const Value: string): Integer;
var
  i, x: Integer;
begin
  Result := 0;
  for i := 1 to Length(Value) do
  begin
    Result := (Result shl 4) + Ord(Value[i]);
    x := Result and $F0000000;
    if (x <> 0) then
      Result := Result xor (x shr 24);
    Result := Result and (not x);
  end;
end;

A few examples you can see in table below:

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December 13, 2001