Editing Hash function (section)

=== Defined range ===
It is often desirable that the output of a hash function have fixed size (but see below). If, for example, the output is constrained to 32-bit integer values, then the hash values can be used to index into an array. Such hashing is commonly used to accelerate data searches.<ref name="algorithms_in_java">{{cite book|title=Algorithms in Java|first=Robert|last=Sedgewick|year=2002|publisher=Addison Wesley|edition=3|isbn=978-0201361209|chapter=14. Hashing}}</ref> Producing fixed-length output from variable-length input can be accomplished by breaking the input data into chunks of specific size. Hash functions used for data searches use some arithmetic expression that iteratively processes chunks of the input (such as the characters in a string) to produce the hash value.<ref name="algorithms_in_java"/>