Thanks for the reply, but I got it fixed, my brain just needed a rest.

The error was coming from trying to pass a string to the function that wanted the values passed as a referenced character array. I just worked some things around and made my cin value a character array and all's well.

The function's job is to convert a string into unsigned long integers to be hashed and stored in a bloom filter. This program just needed to cout the values gotten from hashing on it, to find out which bits are "turned on".

More info on bloom filters.