my personal favorite UUID replacement, when not concerned with external compatibility or standards-compliance: a 96-bit random value, base64-urlsafe encoded to

my personal favorite UUID replacement, when not concerned with external compatibility or standards-compliance: a 96-bit random value, base64-urlsafe encoded to 16 ASCII characters >>> import secrets >>> secrets.token_urlsafe(12) 'uUBpBk2eENDslHyw' with UUID, you can store it as a compact 16 bytes in a database, but it needs 36 characters if you want to embed it in a URL or a JSON payload. and there's a temptation to be "clever" and strip out the hyphens to shave off 4 bytes and create a nonstandard UUID format. by comparison these have one single canonical representation that is always a 16-character URL-safe string.