Generating 8-character only UUIDs

Question

UUID libraries generate 32-character UUIDs.

I want to generate 8-character only UUIDs, is it possible?

Answer 1

You can try RandomStringUtils class from apache.commons:

import org.apache.commons.lang3.RandomStringUtils;

final int SHORT_ID_LENGTH = 8;

// all possible unicode characters
String shortId = RandomStringUtils.random(SHORT_ID_LENGTH);

Please keep in mind, that it will contain all possible characters which is neither URL nor human friendly.

So check out other methods too:

// HEX: 0-9, a-f. For example: 6587fddb, c0f182c1
shortId = RandomStringUtils.random(8, "0123456789abcdef"); 

// a-z, A-Z. For example: eRkgbzeF, MFcWSksx
shortId = RandomStringUtils.randomAlphabetic(8); 

// 0-9. For example: 76091014, 03771122
shortId = RandomStringUtils.randomNumeric(8); 

// a-z, A-Z, 0-9. For example: WRMcpIk7, s57JwCVA
shortId = RandomStringUtils.randomAlphanumeric(8); 

As others said probability of id collision with smaller id can be significant. Check out how birthday problem applies to your case. You can find nice explanation how to calculate approximation in this answer.