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I was wondering if the encoding process in coding theory is a hash function?

Are hash function and what is studied in coding theory basically the same thing?

Thanks and regards!

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No. Coding theory deals with encoding and decoding of information, which usually implies that all the information is retained. (There's lossy coding, but still the intention is to retain as much of the information as possible within a given amount of space.) By contrast, the idea of a hash function is to distill a possibly large amount of information into a small amount of information that's just large enough for it to be unlikely that two hashes of different objects coincide.

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    @joriki: Ok. I would call that source coding/compression, but I guess you're right. My exposure is so heavily on the channel coding/FEC side that I tend to forget those. I've mostly seen Huffman *coding* as opposed to *en*coding, but both appear to be in use.2011-07-11