Generating User-Friendly Random IDs

Jul 2, 2017 Mohamed Akram

I stumbled upon the problem of generating short, user-friendly random IDs for a web project. After looking at many existing solutions and not finding a suitable one, I came up with this:

// For production use, see NPM package below
const crypto = require('crypto');

function simpleId(length = 8, chars = '23456789abcdefghjkmnpqrstuvwxyz') {
  const defaultChars = '0123456789abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz';

  const numValues = chars.length ** length;
  const numBytes = Math.ceil(Math.log2(numValues) / 8);
  const randValues = 2 ** (numBytes * 8);

  const threshold = randValues - (randValues % numValues);

  do {
    const bytes = crypto.randomBytes(numBytes);
    var randomNumber = parseInt(bytes.toString('hex'), 16);
  } while (randomNumber >= threshold);

  randomNumber %= numValues;

  const randomId = randomNumber.toString(chars.length).replace(
    /./g, m => chars[defaultChars.indexOf(m)]
  ).padStart(length, chars[0]);

  return randomId;
}

This code generates an 8-character random ID with some useful properties. First, it uses a case-insensitive, 31-character alphabet which consists of the digits and lowercase letters while excluding 01ilo. This significantly reduces the possibility of transcription errors. Secondly, it uses the cryptographically strong crypto.randomBytes() function to reduce the predictability of generated IDs. Lastly, it removes any modulo bias and returns a random ID with the exact length specified.

I’ve created an NPM package which contains the same code with error-checking and some tests. After installing it, you can simply do:

const simpleId = require('simple-id');
simpleId();