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Comment by i_am_jl | Hacker News Reader

>Yeah, but does that matter?

I'm really reaching here, but an ID that omits special characters is easier to extract from a url, since it can be double-clicked in a URL bar to select it, whereas a GUID with hyphens forces the user to select the beginning and the end of the string.

Realistically I think this matters to developers more than users (I hope your application doesn't force users to interact with GUIDs in the address bar) but that's the only "waste" I can identify.

EDIT: Someone elsewhere noted that they can base64 encode their GUIDs to achieve this and I'm seething that I'd never thought to do that

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As you said in your edit, you can of course base64 the GUID, but also don't most GUID libraries have an option to just omit the hyphens? I know .NET allows you to do that, and even correctly parse GUIDs that don't have any hyphens.

I usually did that in .NET simply because I thought it was prettier without the hyphens.

To select an UUID, double click the first segment and drag the selection till the last segment before releasing. No need to aim for the exact beginning and end characters.

(Maybe that's what you meant, amd yes, it's still clunkier than simply double clicking, but not much)

> I'm really reaching here, but an ID that omits special characters is easier to extract from a url, since it can be double-clicked in a URL bar to select it, whereas a GUID with hyphens forces the user to select the beginning and the end of the string.

The is-hyphen-part-of-a-word issue depends on the text control (browser, UI widget library, …) / terminal you use, which is not universal.

In any case, the hyphens/dashes are not required part of the representation, and one can use the “dashless” representation (exactly 32 hex digits) in URLs and in-code without any issues whatsoever, as far as I know; for example, Postgres accepts either “dashful” or “dashless” UUIDs the same.

> easier to extract from a url, since it can be double-clicked

Maybe the double-click logic needs to be less stupid then. Or have it progressive, e.g. double-click = alphanumeric, triple-click = stop at symbols, quadruple-click = stop at slashes only, quintiple-click = the whole URL.

Use the device microphone to listen for swear words and adjust algorithm with machine learning accordingly

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