error for hash function of pair of ints

Shambo picture Shambo · Dec 15, 2013 · Viewed 33.5k times · Source

I have the following class with an unordered_map member, and a hash function defined for pair<int,int>

class abc
{public :
    unordered_map < pair<int,int> , int > rules ;
    unsigned nodes;
    unsigned packet ;     
};

namespace std {
template <>
    class hash < std::pair< int,int> >{
    public :
        size_t operator()(const pair< int, int> &x ) const
        {
            size_t h =   std::hash<int>()(x.first) ^ std::hash<int>()(x.second);
            return  h ;
        }
    };
}

But I am getting the following errors :

error: invalid use of incomplete type ‘struct std::hash<std::pair<int, int> >

error: declaration of ‘struct std::hash<std::pair<int, int> >

error: type ‘std::__detail::_Hashtable_ebo_helper<1, std::hash<std::pair<int, int> >, true>’ is not a direct base of ‘std::__detail::_Hash_code_base<std::pair<int, int>, std::pair<const std::pair<int, int>, int>, std::__detail::_Select1st, std::hash<std::pair<int, int> >, std::__detail::_Mod_range_hashing, std::__detail::_Default_ranged_hash, true>’

Answer

Casey picture Casey · Dec 16, 2013

Unfortunately, this program has undefined behavior. C++11 §17.6.4.2.1:

A program may add a template specialization for any standard library template to namespace std only if the declaration depends on a user-defined type and the specialization meets the standard library requirements for the original template and is not explicitly prohibited.

hash<pair<int,int>> depends on primitive and standard library types only. This is easily worked around by defining your hash class outside of namespace std, and using that hash explicitly in your map declaration:

struct pairhash {
public:
  template <typename T, typename U>
  std::size_t operator()(const std::pair<T, U> &x) const
  {
    return std::hash<T>()(x.first) ^ std::hash<U>()(x.second);
  }
};

class abc {
  std::unordered_map<std::pair<int,int>, int, pairhash> rules;
};

EDIT: I've used xor to combine the hashes of the pair members here because I'm lazy, but for serious use xor is a fairly crappy hash combining function.