I've created a system where users upload videos to my server's filesystem and I need a way to generate unique filenames for the video files. Should I be using random.getrandbits? Is there a way to do this with a combination of letters and numbers?
3 Answers
This is what I use:
import base64
import uuid
base64.urlsafe_b64encode(uuid.uuid4().bytes)
I generate a uuid, but I use the bytes instead of larger hex version or one with dashes. Then I encode it into a URL-safe base-64 string. This is a shorter length string than using hex, but using base64 makes it so that the characters in the string are safe for files, urls and most other things.
One problem is that even with the urlsafe_b64encode, it always wants to '='s signs onto the end which are not so url-safe. The '='s signs are for decoding the base-64 encoded information, so if you are only trying to generate random strings, then you can probably safey remove them with:
str.replace('=', '')
3 Comments
Graham Mitchell
This is EXACTLY what I needed right now; thanks! Just thought you'd want to know that your answer to a low-scoring question still helped a random guy on the Internet.
Chris Dutrow
Thanks for the feedback. For us, its held up to the test of time so far, its almost a year later we still use this little snippit of code to generate primary keys throughout our entire application.
Jacob Davis-Hansson
Noting that on Python 3 I had to include
.decode('utf-8') to get a string to do replacement on: base64.urlsafe_b64encode(uuid.uuid4().bytes).decode('utf-8').replace('=', '')You can use, in Python 3.6, the secrets module.
>>> import secrets
>>> secrets.token_urlsafe(8)
'Pxym7N2zJRs'
Further documentation is here: https://docs.python.org/3/library/secrets.html
Comments
Take a look at Universally unique identifiers (UUID) and Python's module uuid.
/tmpfilesystem.