How To: Convert String of Unknown Length into a Unique Value

[campbelt]

Hello,

I am trying to figure out a way to convert a string of some unknown length into a unique value (INT or NVARCHAR) no longer than 15 characters. Is this possible? Any thoughts or ideas?

I have been exploring various hashing algorithms and the like, btu they all produce values that are too long.

Thank you very much for your time.

 

[MartinCroft]

It really depends on your string length and number of rows you are likely to use. For example if you had a 10 char string, you could populate a table with values 1 through to 99999 and then convert this to a string and add to the 10 char value. Then you would have a 15 char string that was unique upto 99,999 values

etc
1+SMITH = 1SMITH
99+SMITH = 99SMITH
9999+SMITH = 9999+SMITH

Don't know if meets your requirements or not it really depends on what you want to achieve, there are always more than 1 way to do anything in SQL.

Hope that give you some ideas towards a solution