The thing that he ended up recommending however was super interesting in that I had never seen it mentioned before but it was basically to use this instead http://www.crockford.com/base32.html
Seems to have the same idea of "human-read-write without visually identical characters" but with an expanded set for shorter string length.
The only issue I've had with UUIDs is when they don't sort in increasing chronological order. RDBMSs don't appreciate high insert loads into random points in the index. Take care of that, however, and they're a treat.
(Or do you mean the original article, rather than the linked Crockford article?)
> This alphabet, 0123456789ABCDEFGHJKMNPQRSTVWXYZ, is Douglas Crockford's Base32, chosen for human readability and being able to call it out over a phone if required.
Also 2 and Z can be similar in writing.
However it is nice to not see 0 and O, 1,I,l in the same string.
POTS = Plain old telephony service is restricted to a narrow frequency range of 300–3,300 Hz, called the voiceband, which is much less than the human hearing range of 20–20,000 Hz [from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plain_old_telephone_service ]
Fun fact: dzs counts as a single letter in Hungarian (e.g. in alphabetical ordering).
- It's case-insensitive allowing data encoded with it to survive going through most random line-of-business applications which may have errant UPPER() or lower() calls somewhere in their depths, as well as making it easy for humans to talk about out-loud (no need to specify case makes it easy)
- Making all the "pillar" shaped characters (I, i, 1, l) equivalent and all the "donut" shaped characters (o, O, 0) equivalent means big swaths of human typing mistakes are avoided. After so much exposure to Crockford Base32, I now loath having to decipher "is it a capitol 'I'? Or a lowercase 'l'?"
Overall, it's a great way to encode any user-facing ID; just make sure you understand that just using this encoding won't stop users from realizing that Crockford Base32 encoded IDs are sequential. If you want sequential IDs to appear non-obviously sequential after encoding you'll need to use additional techniques. Assuming Crockford Base32 obscures sequential IDs is the one case where I saw someone do something they shouldn't as it directly relates to Crockford Base32.
Base32 is a representation format which provides a textual representation of numbers, not a storage format.
I mean, anyone is free to dump Base32, or even base 2, into a string and just run with that, but that would be highly inefficient.
I just added it to the "Other projects" section of my base converter. https://convert.zamicol.com/
I loved it, think it all made a ton of sense. Lots of code samples, no weird technology choices (normally they would do it all via protobufs and gRPC but they keep the same principles and just use HTTP instead and Typescript for code samples)
Section 6.3.3 gets to the point about base32