SUID : A gem to generate sorta unique IDs
github: http://github.com/dburkes/suid
Intro
SUIDs are sorta unique IDs. A SUID is similar to a UUID, except that SUIDs
Are only 11 characters long
Are semi human-readable
Don't make URLs look ridiculous
A SUID consists of 11 characters from the set [A-Za-z0-9], so the resulting namespace can hold 62^11 unique values. That's a lot smaller namespace than UUIDs, but, if it's good enough for YouTube URLs, I'm willing to bet it's good enough for a lot of other things too.
Installation
gem install suid
Usage
SUID.generate => "bEsrB0H2yw1"
suid = SUID.new
suid.to_s => "kwNr8FMYAaO"
suit.to_i => 17229968328302299310
Notes
- You can seed the random number generator if you want with
srand
, but ruby does that automatically when it starts up, so, unless you purposefully want to create duplicate SUIDs, don't bother.