I'm wondering why this is so difficult. If you take a string as the key to a hash, that string is actually an array of bytes, which is probably searched for by the C function strcmp. Now all I want is an array of which the elements are a tad larger (4 bytes iso 1 byte, because I need unsigned longs), and possibly another hash function (hashword in http://burtleburtle.net/bob/c/lookup3.c) and another comparison function similar to strcmp but working on integers.