qid

The Qid - "Quintessential Internet ID"

Yes, the name is contrived as hell. Iid was a bit confusing. All other cool initial letters were taken in npm ;-)

What's that? Simply uuid/v4, base62-encoded, zero-justified to 22 chars. It looks like "1eCH6Km2kWjIviA5l6q9VN" — made up of only latin letters and numbers. You probably know all about it already.

Looking around, the packages I found seemed shady. Or maybe it was NIH.

The purpose of Qid

• Clean and simple for APIs, micro-service messaging, apps — you know; internet-stuff
• Generate a 128-bit Uuid/v4, encoded as a 22-char base-62 string: "Qid"
• Many mqtt broker implementations has max 22 chars for client_id. Perfect.
• Since it's considered practically and reasonably collision-free (unless using a sucky PRNG like WinAPI), it can be used to create unique ID's in a decentralized fashion. Good for internet-stuff and mobile.
• It's not as grotesquely in your face as "289b5d90-4f9b-4095-916b-d82451cf9f53" (uuid/v4 canonical hexadecimal string representation)
• Convert to and from Uuid/v4 canonical 36-char format for interfacing with databases, external APIs, etc
• Needless to say, loss-less conversion for all 128-bits, whereof 122 bits are entropy, as per specs.

Sidenotes

• Written in TypeScript for safety's sake, type-defs included
• Uses arrays instead of buffers for browser-friendlyness
• Compiles to ES-mod and CommonJs-mod, to suit direct nodejs-usage, and pre-compiler chains for tree-shaking
• It leverages quite a bit of tidsbits from "base-x" (through a lineage of different authors), and depends on the ubiquituous "uuid" module

Example

const {Qid} = require("qid") // Or `import {Qid} from "qid"`
say = console.log
 
const qid = Qid()
say(qid)
 
const uuid = Qid.toUuid(qid)
say(uuid)
 
const qid2 = Qid.fromUuid(uuid)
say(qid2)
 
say(qid === qid2)

Example output:

1eCH6Km2kWjIviA5l6q9VN
289b5d90-4f9b-4095-916b-d82451cf9f53
1eCH6Km2kWjIviA5l6q9VN
true

That's all folks!