Leismore ShortID Specification v4.0.0 LTS

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27 February 2023

Authors

• Kyle Chine Leismore https://kylechine.leismore.co

Copyright

GNU Free Documentation License Version 1.3

Canonical URLs

• This version: https://lmos.leismore.org/shortid-spec/v4-0-0/rep/README.md

• Latest version: https://lmos.leismore.org/shortid-spec/latest/rep/README.md

• Project Homepage: https://lmos.leismore.org/shortid-spec

• GitHub: https://github.com/leismore/shortid-spec

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Introduction

Leismore ShortID is a universally unique identifier based on Nano ID (Sitnik [2017] 2021). This document describes its purpose, format, recommended comparison method, and other technical details.

Purpose and Designing Considerations

Ideally, a universally unique identifier exposing to end-users or external applications via digital medias, should be:

1. No collision in the near future
2. Friendly for human readers
3. URL friendly character set
4. Short and fixed length

Format

• Character set ( nolookalikes from Nanoid-Dictionary (Lashmanov [2018] 2021) ):

  •                `346789ABCDEFGHJKLMNPQRTUVWXYabcdefghijkmnpqrtwxyz`
    

• Length: 20 characters
• Canonical syntax: XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX
• Case-sensitive

Recommended Comparison Method

The - characters are used purely for the human readability reason. It must not be considered as a semantics part in Leismore ShortID. While doing ID comparison, it must be removed from the IDs.

Chance of Collision

When 1,000 IDs are being generated per second, in order to have a 1% probability of at least one collision, ~358 thousand years are needed, according to the calculation of Nano ID CC (Zhuravlёv n.d.)

References

• Sitnik, Andrey. (2017) 2021. Nano ID. JavaScript. https://github.com/ai/nanoid.
• Lashmanov, Stanislav. (2018) 2021. Nanoid-Dictionary. JavaScript. https://github.com/CyberAP/nanoid-dictionary.
• Zhuravlёv, Aleksandr. n.d. Nano ID CC. Web. Accessed October 19, 2021. https://zelark.github.io/nano-id-cc.