The Qid. Quintessential Internet Id (base62-encoded uuid/v4)
npm install qidYes, the name is contrived as hell. Iid was a bit confusing. All other cool initial letters were taken in npm ;-)
What's that? Simply uuid/v4, base62-encoded, zero-justified to 22 chars. It looks like "1eCH6Km2kWjIviA5l6q9VN" — made up of only latin letters and numbers. You probably know all about it already.
Looking around, the packages I found seemed shady. Or maybe it was NIH.
- Clean and simple for APIs, micro-service messaging, apps — you know; internet-stuff
- Generate a 128-bit Uuid/v4, encoded as a 22-char base-62 string: "Qid"
- Many mqtt broker implementations has max 22 chars for client_id. Perfect.
- Since it's considered practically and reasonably collision-free (unless using a sucky PRNG like WinAPI), it can be used to create unique ID's in a decentralized fashion. Good for internet-stuff and mobile.
- It's not as grotesquely in your face as "289b5d90-4f9b-4095-916b-d82451cf9f53" (uuid/v4 canonical hexadecimal string representation)
- Convert to and from Uuid/v4 canonical 36-char format for interfacing with databases, external APIs, etc
- Needless to say, loss-less conversion for all 128-bits, whereof 122 bits are entropy, as per specs.
- Written in TypeScript for safety's sake, type-defs included
- Uses arrays instead of buffers for browser-friendlyness
- Compiles to ES-mod and CommonJs-mod, to suit direct nodejs-usage, and pre-compiler chains for tree-shaking
- It leverages quite a bit of tidsbits from "base-x" (through a lineage of different authors), and depends on the ubiquituous "uuid" module
``javascriptimport {Qid} from "qid"
const {Qid} = require("qid") // Or
say = console.log
const qid = Qid()
say(qid)
const uuid = Qid.toUuid(qid)
say(uuid)
const qid2 = Qid.fromUuid(uuid)
say(qid2)
say(qid === qid2)
`
Example output:
`
1eCH6Km2kWjIviA5l6q9VN
289b5d90-4f9b-4095-916b-d82451cf9f53
1eCH6Km2kWjIviA5l6q9VN
true
That's all folks!