Python uuid4, How to limit the length of Unique chars

Question

In Python, I am using uuid4() method to create a unique char set. But I can not find a way to limit that to 10 or 8 characters. Is there any way?

uuid4()

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Thanks.

Answer 1

You can use shortuuid package.

pip install shortuuid

then it would be similar to UUID package.

import shortuuid
shortuuid.uuid()

Output

'vytxeTZskVKR7C7WgdSP3d'

Custom Length UUID

shortuuid.ShortUUID().random(length=22)

Output

'RaF56o2r58hTKT7AYS9doj'

Source - https://pypi.org/project/shortuuid/

Answer 2

The previous answers do not provide a UUID, either because they truncate the string or because they didn't generate a UUID to begin with. According to the documentation, if you truncate the string "[t]he IDs won’t be universally unique any longer [...]" and the documentation describes ShortUUID().random() to generate a cryptographically secure string instead of a UUID.

However, you can change the UUID length indirectly by changing the number of characters in the alphabet. In the implementation of ShortUUID.encoded_length() you can see that the UUID length is int(math.ceil(16 * math.log(256) / math.log(len(alphabet)))). You can change the alphabet by shortuuid.set_alphabet().

The more characters in the alphabet, the shorter the UUID can be and still be unique.