A tiny, secure, URL-friendly, unique string ID generator for Rust

extern crate nanoid;
use nanoid::nanoid;

fn main() {
   let id = nanoid!(); //=> "Uakgb_J5m9g~0JDMbcJqLJ"
}

Safe. It uses cryptographically strong random APIs and guarantees a proper distribution of symbols.

Compact. It uses a larger alphabet than UUID (A-Za-z0-9_~) and has a similar number of unique IDs in just 21 symbols instead of 36.

The main module uses URL-friendly symbols (A-Za-z0-9_~) and returns an ID with 21 characters.

extern crate nanoid;
use nanoid::nanoid;

fn main() {
   let id = nanoid!(); //=> "Uakgb_J5m9g~0JDMbcJqLJ"
}

Symbols -,.() are not encoded in the URL. If used at the end of a link they could be identified as a punctuation symbol.

If you want to reduce ID length (and increase collisions probability), you can pass the length as an argument generate function:

extern crate nanoid;
use nanoid::nanoid;

fn main() {
   let id = nanoid!(10); //=> "IRFa~VaY2b"
}

If you want to change the ID's alphabet or length you can use the low-level custom module.

extern crate nanoid;
use nanoid::nanoid;

fn main() {
    let alphabet: [char; 16] = [
        '1', '2', '3', '4', '5', '6', '7', '8', '9', '0', 'a', 'b', 'c', 'd', 'e', 'f'
    ];

   let id = nanoid(10, &alphabet); //=> "4f90d13a42"
}

Alphabet must contain 256 symbols or less. Otherwise, the generator will not be secure.

You can replace the default safe random generator using the complex module. For instance, to use a seed-based generator.

extern crate nanoid;
use nanoid::nanoid;

fn randomByte () -> u8 { 0 }

fn main() {
    fn random (size: usize) -> Vec<u8> {
        let mut bytes: Vec<u8> = vec![0; size];

        for i in 0..size {
            bytes[i] = randomByte();
        }

        bytes
    }

    nanoid!(10, &['a', 'b', 'c', 'd', 'e', 'f'], random); //=> "fbaefaadeb"
}

random function must accept the array size and return an vector with random numbers.

If you want to use the same URL-friendly symbols with format, you can get the default alphabet from the url module:

extern crate nanoid;
use nanoid::nanoid;

fn random (size: usize) -> Vec<u8> {
    let result: Vec<u8> = vec![0; size];

    result
}

fn main() {
    nanoid!(10, &nanoid::alphabet::SAFE, random); //=> "93ce_Ltuub"
}

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