Hash string into RGB color

Question

Is there a best practice on how to hash an arbitrary string into a RGB color value? Or to be more general: to 3 bytes.

You\'re asking: When will I ever need this? It doe

Answer 1

For any Javascript users out there, I combined the accepted answer from @jeff-foster with the djb2 hash function from erlycoder.

The result per the question:

function djb2(str){
  var hash = 5381;
  for (var i = 0; i < str.length; i++) {
    hash = ((hash << 5) + hash) + str.charCodeAt(i); /* hash * 33 + c */
  }
  return hash;
}

function hashStringToColor(str) {
  var hash = djb2(str);
  var r = (hash & 0xFF0000) >> 16;
  var g = (hash & 0x00FF00) >> 8;
  var b = hash & 0x0000FF;
  return "#" + ("0" + r.toString(16)).substr(-2) + ("0" + g.toString(16)).substr(-2) + ("0" + b.toString(16)).substr(-2);
}

UPDATE: Fixed the return string to always return a #000000 format hex string based on an edit by @alexc (thanks!).