Resolving collisions

Each position in the hash table is often called a slot or bucket that can store an element. Each data item in the form of a (key, value) pair is stored in the hash table at a position that is decided by the hash value of the key. Let’s take an example in which firstly we use the hashing function that computes the hash value by summing up the ordinal values of all the characters. Then, we compute the final hash value (in other words, the index position) by computing the total ordinal values of module 256. Here, we use 256 slots/buckets as an example. We can use any number of slots depending upon how many records we require in the hash table. We show a sample hash in Figure 8.5, which has key strings corresponding to data values, for example, the eggs key string has the corresponding data value 123456789.

This hash table uses a hashing function that maps the input string hello world to a hash value of 92, which finds a slot position in the hash table...