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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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
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:
Turns out I cannot edit comments…