SUID : A gem to generate sorta unique IDs

github: http://github.com/dburkes/suid

rdocs: http://rdoc.info/projects/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.

License

SUID is released under the MIT License