suid 1.0.1

Generates sortable, date/time-containing, human friendly unique string IDs

Generates sortable, date/time-containing, human friendly unique string IDs. The default length of generated IDs is 24 characters containing 118 bits total.

Features

• Consists of only unambiguous lowercase letters and digits for human readability.

• The first and last characters are letters chosen from among the most neat ones.

• The generated IDs contain the date/time with a potential precision of 50ns encoded in the first 12 characters.

• Extractable date/time.

• The order of the strings is the same as the order of the date/time encoded in them.

• The remaining characters contain highest possible secure random bits, generated from the following sources of entropy:

  • Current process ID

  • Hostname

  • Random bits of the highest possible secure source of randomness

  • Environment variable names and values

  • A counter that is randomly initialized when the module is imported and thead-safely incremented each time suid_gen is called

Installing

pip install suid

Every time the module is loaded it performs a time_ns precision test. If worse than 5 mks, a warning is logged. On the Windows platform it is recommended to install the win-precise-time package:

pip install win-precise-time

Usage

Generate a unique ID containing the current date/time:

>>> from suid import suid_gen
>>> suid_gen()
'by6wtze6jduq6ksj4tbsnjcx'

Generate a unique ID of the specified length:

>>> suid_gen(length=32)
'by6wtzvyyq380mc4fdyv9q1p1bbyr1vp'

Generate a unique ID containing a custom date/time:

>>> from datetime import datetime, timezone
>>> dt = datetime(year=2023, month=11, day=10, hour=14, minute=26, second=15, microsecond=1234, tzinfo=timezone.utc)
>>> suid_gen(at=dt)
'by640s7bh6vc9rk2s5ud6wvw'

Extract encoded date/time from ID:

>>> from suid import suid_to_datetime
>>> suid_to_datetime('by640s7bh6vc9rk2s5ud6wvw')
datetime.datetime(2023, 11, 10, 14, 26, 15, 1234, tzinfo=datetime.timezone.utc)

There is a helper function to get the current date/time, which can be more precise then the standard datetime.now(tz=timezone.utc):

>>> from suid import utcnow
>>> utcnow()
datetime.datetime(2023, 11, 26, 9, 0, 35, 886315, tzinfo=datetime.timezone.utc)

1.0.1 —

• Fixed a bug with incorrect sort order.

1.0

• Initial version.