hashing strings to integers for sqlite3 keys

[Chris Angelico]

On Fri, May 23, 2014 at 12:47 AM, Adam Funk <a24061 at ducksburg.com> wrote:
>> I don't know that there is, at least not with hashlib. You might be
>> able to use digest() followed by the struct module, but it's no less
>> convoluted. It's the same in several other languages' hashing
>> functions; the result is a string, not an integer.
>
> Well, J*v* returns a byte array...

I counted byte arrays along with strings. Whether it's notionally a
string of bytes or characters makes no difference - it's not an
integer.

> I dunno why language designers don't make it easy to get a single big
> number directly out of these things.

It's probably because these sorts of hashes are usually done on large
puddles of memory, to create a smaller puddle of memory. How you
interpret the resulting puddle is up to you; maybe you want to think
of it as a number, maybe as a string, but really it's just a sequence
of bytes.

ChrisA