UNIVERSITY INSTITUTE OF

ENGINEERING
DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE
AND ENGG.

Bachelor of Engineering (Computer Science & Engineering)

DATA STRUCTURES 21CSH-211

HASHING DISCOVER . LEARN . EMPOWER

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HASHING

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Applications of Hashing
• Construct a message authentication code (MAC)
• Digital signature
• Make commitments, but reveal message later
• Time stamping
• Key updating: key is hashed at specific intervals resulting in new key

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 Hash Tables
• We’ll discuss the hash table ADT which supports only a subset of the operations allowed by
binary search trees.
• The implementation of hash tables is called hashing.
• Hashing is a technique used for performing insertions, deletions and finds in constant average
time (i.e. O(1))
• This data structure, however, is not efficient in operations that require any ordering information
among the elements, such as findMin, findMax and printing the entire table in sorted order.

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 General Idea
• The ideal hash table structure is merely an array of some fixed size, containing the items.
• A stored item needs to have a data member, called key, that will be used in computing the index
value for the item.
• Key could be an integer, a string, etc
• e.g. a name or Id that is a part of a large employee structure
• The size of the array is TableSize.
• The items that are stored in the hash table are indexed by values from 0 to TableSize – 1.
• Each key is mapped into some number in the range 0 to TableSize – 1.
• The mapping is called a hash function.

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Example Hash
Table
0
1
Items
2
john 25000 john25000
25000
3 john
phil 31250 key Hash 4 phil31250
phil 31250
Function
dave 27500 5
6 dave27500
dave 27500
mary 28200
7 mary28200
mary 28200

key 8
9

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Hash Function
• The hash function:
• must be simple to compute.
• must distribute the keys evenly among the cells.
• If we know which keys will occur in advance we can write perfect hash
functions, but we don’t.

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Hash function
Problems:
• Keys may not be numeric.
• Number of possible keys is much larger than the space available in table.
• Different keys may map into same location
• Hash function is not one-to-one => collision.
• If there are too many collisions, the performance of the hash table will suffer
dramatically.

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Hash Functions
• If the input keys are integers then simply Key mod TableSize is a
general strategy.
• Unless key happens to have some undesirable properties. (e.g. all keys end
in 0 and we use mod 10)
• If the keys are strings, hash function needs more care.
• First convert it into a numeric value.

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Some methods
• Truncation:
• e.g. 123456789 map to a table of 1000 addresses by picking 3 digits of the key.
• Folding:
• e.g. 123|456|789: add them and take mod.
• Key mod N:
• N is the size of the table, better if it is prime.
• Squaring:
• Square the key and then truncate
• Radix conversion:
• e.g. 1 2 3 4 treat it to be base 11, truncate if necessary.

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 Hash Function 1
• Add up the ASCII values of all characters of the key.
int hash(const string &key, int tableSize)
{
int hasVal = 0;

for (int i = 0; i < key.length(); i++)

hashVal += key[i];
return hashVal % tableSize;
}
• Simple to implement and fast.
• However, if the table size is large, the function does not distribute the keys well.
• e.g. Table size =10000, key length <= 8, the hash function can assume values only between
0 and 1016

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 Hash Function 2
• Examine only the first 3 characters of the key.
int hash (const string &key, int tableSize)
{
return (key[0]+27 * key[1] + 729*key[2]) % tableSize;
}

• In theory, 26 * 26 * 26 = 17576 different words can be generated. However, English is not random,
only 2851 different combinations are possible.
• Thus, this function although easily computable, is also not appropriate if the hash table is reasonably
large.

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Hash Function 3
KeySize 1
hash( key )   Key
i 0
[ KeySize  i  1]  37 i

int hash (const string &key, int tableSize)

{
int hashVal = 0;

for (int i = 0; i < key.length(); i++)

hashVal = 37 * hashVal + key[i];

hashVal %=tableSize;
if (hashVal < 0) /* in case overflows occurs */
hashVal += tableSize;

return hashVal;
};
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 Hash function for strings:
key[i]
98 108 105

key a l i
0 1 2 i
KeySize = 3;

hash(“ali”) = (105 * 1 + 108*37 + 98*372) % 10,007 = 8172

0
1
2
“ali” hash ……
function 8172
ali
……
10,006 (TableSize)

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 References
1. Lipschutz, Seymour, “Data Structures”, Schaum's Outline Series, Tata McGraw Hill.
2. Data structure and algorithm by Narasimha Karumanchi.
3. www.tutorialspoint.com
4. www.geeksforgeeks.com

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 Books Recommended
• Lipschutz, Seymour, “Data Structures”, Schaum's Outline Series, Tata McGraw Hill.
• Gilberg/Forouzan,” Data Structure with C ,Cengage Learning.
• Augenstein,Moshe J , Tanenbaum, Aaron M, “Data Structures using C and C++”, Prentice Hall
of India
• Goodrich, Michael T., Tamassia, Roberto, and Mount, David M., “Data Structures and
Algorithms in C++”, Wiley Student Edition.
• Aho, Alfred V., Ullman, Jeffrey D., Hopcroft ,John E. “Data Structures and Algorithms”,
Addison Wesley.
THANK YOU

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