squishid-go

Squish IDs into shorter strings

squishid is an alternative base32 encoding format that, compared to the standard format, makes IDs shorter by squishing sequentially repeating elements.

Motivation

Web applications often use entity IDs in URLs as raw numbers or by transforming them into a string. As the IDs can be quite large numbers, they can make the URL overly long so that it looks unappealing or even suspicious.

Squished IDs don't necessarily make URLs more beautiful, but in many cases they definitely make them shorter.

number:   https://example.com/post/4611686018427387904/help-ids-are-too-long-what-to-do-squish-them
base64:   https://example.com/post/AAAAAAAAAEA/help-ids-are-too-long-what-to-do-squish-them
base32:   https://example.com/post/aaaaaaaaaaaea/help-ids-are-too-long-what-to-do-squish-them
squishid: https://example.com/post/nnae/help-ids-are-too-long-what-to-do-squish-them

Usage

package main

import (
	"fmt"
	"github.com/ZentriaMC/squishid/squishid"
)

func main() {
	fmt.Println(squishid.Squish(666))

	id, err := squishid.Restore("4x")
	if err != nil {
		panic("invalid ID")
	}
	fmt.Println(id)
}

Result:
4x
666

Alphabet

abcdefghijkmopqrstuwxyz123456789

squish indicators:
lovn

Comparison

number:   0
base32:   aaaaaaaaaaaaa
squishid: a

number:   4611686018427387904
base32:   aaaaaaaaaaaea
squishid: nnae

worst case:
number:   14242959524133701664
binary:   1100 01011 01010 01001 01000 00111 00110 00101 00100 00011 00010 00001 00000
base32:   eceedcrzfcu4k
squishid: abcdefghijkmo

Limitations

squishid is useful only when the IDs are sequential. Random IDs don't work well with squishid because they, in general, lack sequentially repeating elements that are required for the squishing algorithm to make the generated string shorter. See the worst case example above.

Currently, only 64-bit integers are supported.

License

MIT

Originally appearing under kadfak/squishid-go, but seems like user has deleted their account.