Perfect hash function for strings known in advance - c++

Question

I have 4000 strings and I want to create a perfect hash table with these strings. The strings are known in advance, so my first idea was to use a series of if statements:
if (name=="aaa")
return 1;
else if (name=="bbb")
return 2;
.
.
.
// 4000th `if' statement
However, this would be very inefficient. Is there a better way?

Answer 1

gperf is a tool that does exactly that:
GNU gperf is a perfect hash function generator. For a given list of strings, it produces a hash function and hash table, in form of C or C++ code, for looking up a value depending on the input string. The hash function is perfect, which means that the hash table has no collisions, and the hash table lookup needs a single string comparison only.
According to the documentation, gperf is used to generate the reserved keyword recogniser for lexers in GNU C, GNU C++, GNU Java, GNU Pascal, GNU Modula 3, and GNU indent.
The way it works is described in GPERF: A Perfect Hash Function Generator by Douglas C. Schmidt.

Answer 2

Better later than never, I believe this now finally answers the OP question:
Simply use https://github.com/serge-sans-paille/frozen -- a Compile-time (constexpr) library of immutable containers for C++ (using "perfect hash" under the hood).
On my tests, it performed in pair with the famous GNU's gperf perfect hash C code generator.
On your pseudo-code terms:
#include <frozen/unordered_map.h>
#include <frozen/string.h>
constexpr frozen::unordered_map<frozen::string, int, 2> olaf = {
{"aaa", 1},
{"bbb", 2},
.
.
.
// 4000th element
};
return olaf.at(name);
Will respond in O(1) time rather than OP's O(n)
-- O(n) assuming the compiler wouldn't optimize your if chain, which it might do)

Answer 3

Since the question is still unanswered and I'm about to add the same functionality to my HFT platform, I'll share my inventory for Perfect Hash Algorithms in C++. It is harder than I thought to find an open, flexible and bug free implementation, so I'm sharing the ones I didn't drop yet:
The CMPH library, with a collection of papers and such algorithms -- https://git.code.sf.net/p/cmph/git
BBHash, one more implementation from a paper's author -- https://github.com/rizkg/BBHash
Ademakov's -- another implementation from the paper above -- https://github.com/ademakov/PHF
wahern/phf -- I'm currently inspecting this one and trying to solve some allocation bugs it has when dealing with C++ Strings on huge key sets -- https://github.com/wahern/phf.git
emphf -- seems unmantained -- https://github.com/ot/emphf.git

Answer 4

I believe #NPE's answer is very reasonable, and I doubt it is too much for your application as you seem to imply.
Consider the following example: suppose you have your "engine" logic (that is: your application's functionality) contained in a file called engine.hpp:
// this is engine.hpp
#pragma once
#include <iostream>
void standalone() {
std::cout << "called standalone" << std::endl;
}
struct Foo {
static void first() {
std::cout << "called Foo::first()" << std::endl;
}
static void second() {
std::cout << "called Foo::second()" << std::endl;
}
};
// other functions...
and suppose you want to dispatch the different functions based on the map:
"standalone" dispatches void standalone()
"first" dispatches Foo::first()
"second" dispatches Foo::second()
# other dispatch rules...
You can do that using the following gperf input file (I called it "lookups.gperf"):
%{
#include "engine.hpp"
struct CommandMap {
const char *name;
void (*dispatch) (void);
};
%}
%ignore-case
%language=C++
%define class-name Commands
%define lookup-function-name Lookup
struct CommandMap
%%
standalone, standalone
first, Foo::first
second, Foo::second
Then you can use gperf to create a lookups.hpp file using a simple command:
gperf -tCG lookups.gperf > lookups.hpp
Once I have that in place, the following main subroutine will dispatch commands based on what I type:
#include <iostream>
#include "engine.hpp" // this is my application engine
#include "lookups.hpp" // this is gperf's output
int main() {
std::string command;
while(std::cin >> command) {
auto match = Commands::Lookup(command.c_str(), command.size());
if(match) {
match->dispatch();
} else {
std::cerr << "invalid command" << std::endl;
}
}
}
Compile it:
g++ main.cpp -std=c++11
and run it:
$ ./a.out
standalone
called standalone
first
called Foo::first()
Second
called Foo::second()
SECOND
called Foo::second()
first
called Foo::first()
frst
invalid command
Notice that once you have generated lookups.hpp your application has no dependency whatsoever in gperf.
Disclaimer: I took inspiration for this example from this site.