How to Create a UUID in JavaScript
The UUID identifier has been used in programming since the days a baby-faced David Walsh became a professional software engineer. My first exposure to UUIDs was via a ColdFusion app I inherited and ... the less we say about that the better. In any event, I was recently surprised to see that JavaScript has the ability to create UUIDs.
Developers can use the native JavaScript crypto library to generate a UUID:
crypto.randomUUID() // '5872aded-d613-410e-841f-a681a6aa8d8b'
crypto.randomUUID() // 'fe6c7438-a833-4c7c-9ea3-cdc84ef41dfc'
crypto.randomUUID() // 'e47a03d4-5da3-4451-a2c1-265de99cc2c1'
crypto.randomUUID() // '04cdadeb-0228-43db-85dc-ce7e960a6cde'
It's important to remember that the UUID is not guaranteed to be unique, though the probability of repetition is incredibly low. I look forward to exploring the window.crypto API further to see what other cool things we can do!
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The HTML
For the sake of this...
Unfortunately, browser support is very patchy so far…
Plenty of shims/polyills are available.
From https://stackoverflow.com/questions/105034/how-to-create-a-guid-uuid
if (! (crypto.randomUUID instanceof Function)) { crypto.randomUUID = function uuidv4() { return ([1e7]+-1e3+-4e3+-8e3+-1e11).replace(/[018]/g, c => (c ^ crypto.getRandomValues(new Uint8Array(1))[0] & 15 >> c / 4).toString(16) ); } }V8 is not equal to JavaScript
Yes, the article should have included ‘node’ or ‘v8’ in the title.
Probably worth mentioning this doesn’t work in Safari or Firefox and is not a W3C Standard nor is it on the W3C Standards Track.
Are there any other libraries that generate uuid other than crypto in js?
https://github.com/uuidjs/uuid
the uuid library
https://www.npmjs.com/package/uuid
A note on browser support would be useful ;) But it‘s great to see that we can soon use it just like that.
Chromium (including Edge): >=92
Firefox: >=95 (Release notes how I discovered the API)
Safari: :(
IE: No!
shim:
if (! (crypto.randomUUID instanceof Function)) { function uuidv4() { return ([1e7]+-1e3+-4e3+-8e3+-1e11).replace(/[018]/g, c => (c ^ crypto.getRandomValues(new Uint8Array(1))[0] & 15 >> c / 4).toString(16) ); } }Turns out I cannot edit comments…
if (! (crypto.randomUUID instanceof Function)) { crypto.randomUUID = function uuidv4() { return ([1e7]+-1e3+-4e3+-8e3+-1e11).replace(/[018]/g, c => (c ^ crypto.getRandomValues(new Uint8Array(1))[0] & 15 >> c / 4).toString(16) ); } }