prabode/rand62

Rand62

Generates random alphanumeric characters.

Rand62.safe(10)
 => "yTX35RzROS"

Rand62 has better space efficiency than SecureRandom.uuid or SecureRandom.hex. It's sexier than SecureRandom.base64 or SecureRandom.urlsafe_base64 as it doesn't contain any symbols.

If you care more about database efficiency than Ruby, and user-friendliness of the look of IDs, use Rand62.

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'rand62'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install rand62

Usage

There are two methods: safe and fast. Pass the length of generated string to the method.

require 'rand62'

Rand62.safe(10)
 => "yTX35RzROS"

Rand62.fast(10)
 => "sWCGqxY2kF"

It's recommended to use safe until the performance becomes a real problem.

Performance

The following test results came from ruby 1.9.3p125 on iMac 2011 Core i5 2.7GHz.

1000.times{ SecureRandom.urlsafe_base64 }  # 0.006427
1000.times{ Rand62.fast(22) }              # 0.015881
1000.times{ Rand62.safe(22) }              # 0.161878

Contributing

1. Fork it
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Added some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create new Pull Request