Perceptible ID

A customizable ID generator for Elixir which, by default, is limited to the following 22 English characters:

[a, b, c, d, e, f, h, i, j, k, m, n, o, p, r, s, t, w, x, y, 3, 4]

Inspired by Understanding and avoiding visually ambiguous characters in IDs.

Features

• Generate IDs with single function call
• Generate IDs with custom lengths
• Generate IDs with custom character inclusions and exclusions.
• Reasonably performant. See Benchmarks.

Requirements

• Elixir 1.17 or greater
• Erlang OTP 27 or greater

Installation

The package can be installed by adding perceptible_id to your list of dependencies in mix.exs:

def deps do
  [
    {:perceptible_id, "~> 1.0.0"}
  ]
end

Usage

Generating an ID with the default length and default characters from config:

iex> PerceptibleId.generate
"ipbx4ah3"

Generating an ID with a custom length:

iex> PerceptibleId.generate(12)
"cnhxie3sfdtp"

Generating an ID with a custom length, with potential inclusions and ultimate exclusions:

iex> PerceptibleId.generate(12, include: ["1", "2", "3"], exclude: ["a", "b", "c"])
"npokwc3yfed2"

Maximum Possible IDs by Length

This is based on the default number of characters, which is 22.

Character Length	Max Unique IDs
1	22
2	484
3	10,648
4	234,256
5	5,153,632
6	113,379,904
7	2,494,357,888
8 (default)	54,875,873,536
9	1,207,269,217,792
10	26,559,922,791,424
11	584,318,301,411,328
12	12,855,002,631,049,216

Randomization Algorithm

Internally, this is using Erlang's rand module to generate the IDs. It is using the default algorithm, exsss.

Benchmarks

The following benchmark was run for IDs from length 8 to 12 with each test generating 10k IDs.

[1] % mix run benchmarks/general.exs
Operating System: Linux
CPU Information: AMD Ryzen 9 5950X 16-Core Processor
Number of Available Cores: 32
Available memory: 31.26 GB
Elixir 1.17.1
Erlang 27.0
JIT enabled: true

Benchmark suite executing with the following configuration:
warmup: 2 s
time: 5 s
memory time: 0 ns
reduction time: 0 ns
parallel: 1
inputs: none specified
Estimated total run time: 35 s

Benchmarking generate.10 ...
Benchmarking generate.11 ...
Benchmarking generate.12 ...
Benchmarking generate.8 ...
Benchmarking generate.9 ...
Calculating statistics...
Formatting results...

Name                  ips        average  deviation         median         99th %
generate.8          28.87       34.64 ms     ±1.88%       34.49 ms       37.21 ms
generate.10         28.22       35.44 ms     ±1.55%       35.29 ms       38.21 ms
generate.11         27.02       37.01 ms     ±5.18%       36.07 ms       41.43 ms
generate.12         26.82       37.29 ms     ±5.31%       36.25 ms       41.67 ms
generate.9          26.52       37.71 ms     ±6.14%       36.48 ms       41.44 ms

Comparison:
generate.8          28.87
generate.10         28.22 - 1.02x slower +0.80 ms
generate.11         27.02 - 1.07x slower +2.36 ms
generate.12         26.82 - 1.08x slower +2.65 ms
generate.9          26.52 - 1.09x slower +3.07 ms

You can run this on your machine using mix run benchmarks/general.exs.

License

This software is licensed under the Apache-2.0 License.