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language-agnosticuuid

URL safe UUIDs in the smallest number of characters

Ideally I would want something like example.com/resources/äFg4вNгё5, minimum number of visible characters, never mind that they have to be percent encoded before transmitting them over HTTP.

Can you tell a scheme which encodes 128b UUIDs into the least number of visible characters efficiently, without the results having characters which break URLs?

Solution

  • Base-64 is good for this.

    {098ef7bc-a96c-43a9-927a-912fc7471ba2}

    could be encoded as

    vPeOCWypqUOSepEvx0cbog

    The usual equal-signs at the end could be dropped, as they always make the string-length a multiple of 4. And instead of + and /, you could use some safe characters. You can pick two from: - . _ ~

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