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?
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: -
.
_
~
More information:
I use a url-safe base64 string. The following is some Python code that does this*.
The last line removes '=' or '==' sign that base 64 encoding likes to put on the end, they make putting the characters into a URL more difficult and are only necessary for de-encoding the information, which does not need to be done here.
import base64
import uuid
# get a UUID - URL safe, Base64
def get_a_Uuid():
r_uuid = base64.urlsafe_b64encode(uuid.uuid4().bytes)
return r_uuid.replace('=', '')
Above does not work for Python3. This is what I'm doing instead:
r_uuid = base64.urlsafe_b64encode(uuid.uuid4().bytes).decode("utf-8")
return r_uuid.replace('=', '')
*
This does follow the standards: base64.urlsafe_b64encode
follows RFC 3548 and 4648 see https://docs.python.org/2/library/base64.html. Stripping ==
from base64 encoded data with known length is allowed see RFC 4648 §3.2. UUID/GUID are specified in RFC 4122; §4.1 Format states "The UUID format is 16 octets". The base64
-fucntion encodes these 16 octets.
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