smalluuid

Installation

Installation using pip::

pip install smalluuid

Do you use Django? See django-smalluuid_.

Basic Usage

A drop-in replacement for Python's UUID class which – by default – represents UUIDs as 22 character base64-encoded values.

.. code-block:: python

>>> from smalluuid import SmallUUID
>>> uuid = SmallUUID()

# Displays as short UUID by default
>>> uuid
SmallUUID('IBNApQOzTHGzdjkSt6t-Jg')
>>> print(uuid)
IBNApQOzTHGzdjkSt6t-Jg

# Hex output still available
>>> SmallUUID().hex
'44a30f95b86f429f83c5669fed1998ab'
>>> uuid.hex_grouped
'201340a5-03b3-4c71-b376-3912b7ab7e26'

# Will initialise from short UUID
>>> SmallUUID('IBNApQOzTHGzdjkSt6t-Jg')
SmallUUID('IBNApQOzTHGzdjkSt6t-Jg')

# Will load as a hex value
>>> SmallUUID(hex='201340a5-03b3-4c71-b376-3912b7ab7e26')
SmallUUID('RKMPlbhvQp-DxWaf7RmYqw')

Notable differences from Python's UUID implementation:

Short-form UUIDs accepted as first parameter to __init__
Instantiating without a value will assign a random value of the given version (default: 4)
rather than raise an exception.
Addition of hex_grouped property to provide access to grouped hex style UUIDs, formally
provided by __str__.

Typed UUID Usage

An extension of SmallUUID is available in the form of TypedSmallUUID:

.. code-block:: python

>>> from smalluuid import TypedSmallUUID

# Takes a type during instantiation
>>> uuid = TypedSmallUUID(type=42)
>>> uuid
TypedSmallUUID('qHHvXuUwT6y7t7dnsiksvg')

# Type is stored within the UUID
>>> uuid.type
42

# Type determined from provided UUID value
>>> TypedSmallUUID('qHHvXuUwT6y7t7dnsiksvg').type
42

The use case here is that of having UUIDs from which one can determine both an object's ID and the object's type/table/model.