From: Todd Benson <caduceass@...>
Date: 2008-11-12T23:55:57+09:00
Subject: Re: Convert text string i.e 'Peter' into integer ID

On Wed, Nov 12, 2008 at 8:47 AM, Jan Friedrich
<janfri.rubyforge@gmail.com> wrote:
> Justus Ohlhaver <ohlhaver@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Hugh Sasse wrote:
>> Thanks for your help. No I need to turn the string which would usually
>> be a headline ('Man lands on the moon') into a unique number. The
>> purpose is to speed up my database queries when checking whether an
>> entry with the same headline already exists in the db. Justus
> I would do something like this with a md5 hash:
>
>  require 'digest/md5'
>  Digest::MD5.hexdigest('Peter')
>  # => "6fa95b1427af77b3d769ae9cb853382f"
>
> Regards
> Jan

Unless I'm missing something here, strings are just numbers in order.
Why encode/encrypt?

Most db's should handle natural keys.

If absolutely necessary to store as number strings (I can't see why),
look at #pack and #unpack.

Todd