Posted by Seamus on Wednesday, February 29, 2012.

Beware of String#hash being used for cache keys...

Every process will have a different hash value for the same string, so cache keys based on String#hash will not work as expected!

1.9.3-p0 :001 > 'test'.hash
 => 240227015057187339 
1.9.3-p0 :002 > 'test'.hash
 => 240227015057187339

But in another IRB session:

1.9.3-p0 :001 > 'test'.hash
 => -2779337368972820904 
1.9.3-p0 :002 > 'test'.hash
 => -2779337368972820904

All calls to plain vanilla Object#hash have the same problem. It turns out it’s intentional…

… as explained by Yui Naruse:

It is intended. Ruby 1.9 explicitly use session local random seed to calculate a hash for strings (and some other objects).

… just not mentioned in the core Ruby docs for String#hash, which say:

Return a hash based on the string’s length and content.

There is a 7-month old pull request from FND to fix the docs… let’s hope it gets merged soon to prevent further confusion!

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