Thread: String (hostname) to unique integer.

Hey All,

I need to convert a string (hostname) to an unique integer, much like how inet_addr(ip) converts the ip address to an integer.

I was looking at some related posts and I am sure there has got to be a simpler, cleaner solution. Any suggestions?

Thanks!

Why on earth would you want to do that?

Because I can have several hosts and I need to identify requests coming from each of them, so every request will have a unique id, based on what host it is coming from. This unique id will be used to classify the requests, etc. The unique id has got to be int, because I am using a library function which requires an integer as the unique parameter to do classify stuff..

Why don't you just use the IP address?

Each machine's IP is guaranteed to be unique on any network segment... host names are not.

Very nicely you can harvest this directly from the received packets if you use recvfrom()