OK: How about this: 

$ cat testMD5.pl
use strict;

foreach my $url(qw@ /index.html /about/time.html @){
        hashit($url);
}

sub hashit {
   my $url=shift;
   my @ltrs=split(//,$url);
   my $hash = 0;

   foreach my $ltr(@ltrs){
        $hash = ( $hash + ord($ltr)) %10000;
   }
   printf "%s: %0.4d\n",$url,$hash
   
}

[download]
which yields: 
$ perl testMD5.pl 
/index.html: 1066
/about/time.html: 1547

[download]
Keep in mind this is hardly bullet proof. You need to also keep in mind a method to detect hash collisions and and a rehash algorithm.

This brings to mind "the old days" circa 1974 writing assemblers for 8080 microprocessors. Symbol "folding" and hashing.

UPDATE: Limiting yourself to four digits may not be very useful if you have a lot of pages that you are trying to index into your database. The wider your hash is the less likely there will be hash collisions.

Peter L. Berghold -- Unix Professional
Peter -at- Berghold -dot- Net; AOL IM redcowdawg Yahoo IM: blue_cowdawg

In reply to Re^3: Using filepath method to identify an .html page by blue_cowdawg
in thread Using filepath method to identify an .html page by Nik

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.