firebase-humanhash
push()
IDs for JavaScript
Human-readable representations of Firebase Why?
To borrow words from the project that inspired this one, the intent is to generate a human-readable (and, most importantly, memorable) representation of a Firebase push()
ID, unique enough for display in a user interface, where a user may need to remember or verbally communicate the identity of a push()ed location, without having to remember a 20-character random sequence of uppercase/lowercase letters and numbers.
For example, if you're developing a ticket tracker, it's likely that you're using Firebase's push()
to generate new tickets. However, -JJWYEO-S7K2HTDyeQvV
is not very user-friendly if you need to display a ticket number in your app. You could generate ticket numbers through some other process but that's more code and data to you have to maintain, and you've stepped outside the realm of using Firebase as your sole server-side solution.
What if you could increase the chance of displaying a non-unique ID marginally (for all practical purposes), while increasing the the human-readability of the ID dramatically? That's where this library comes in. You still use a Firebase push()
ID to store your tickets in Firebase, but at the moment of display, you "humanize" the ID.
What's unique enough?
This library maps each byte of a 20-byte Firebase push()
ID to a smaller fixed-length representation (from 1 to 19 bytes, default: 4 bytes) using a user-provided dictionary of 256 "words." The number of words chosen corresponds to its statistical uniqueness:
- 1 word: 1 in 256
- 2 words: 1 in 65,536
- 3 words: 1 in 16,777,216
- 4 words: 1 in 4,294,967,300
- etc.
As you can see, even with the default 4 byte compression, the uniqueness can be very high.
How?
Input
Node.js:
HH = require "firebase-humanhash"DEFAULT_HASHER = NUMBER_HASHER = NUMBER_WORDLISTid = "-JJWYEO-S7K2HTDyeQvV"consolelog DEFAULT_HASHERhumanize idconsolelog DEFAULT_HASHERhumanize idwords=6consolelog DEFAULT_HASHERhumanize idwords=20consolelog NUMBER_HASHERhumanize id4""
Also works in the browser as a global or an AMD module.
Output
autumn-lactose-apart-louisiana
grey-georgia-floor-delaware-jersey-berlin
Words must be between 1 and 19
014116006125
Contributions
This library was made possible by: