String related Hash Functions

Question

I'm trying to think up a good hash function for strings. And I was thinking it might be a good idea to sum up the unicode values for the first five characters in the string (assuming it has five, otherwise stop where it ends). Would that be a good idea, or is it a bad one?

I am doing this in Java, but I wouldn't imagine that would make much of a difference.

Answer 1

Usually hashes wouldn't do sums, otherwise stop and pots will have the same hash.

and you wouldn't limit it to the first n characters because otherwise house and houses would have the same hash.

Generally hashs take values and multiply it by a prime number (makes it more likely to generate unique hashes) So you could do something like:

int hash = 7;
for (int i = 0; i < strlen; i++) {
    hash = hash*31 + charAt(i);
}