This package is .NET implementation of ai's nanoid!

Safe. It uses thread safe cryptographically strong random generator by default.

Compact. It uses more symbols than UUID (A-Za-z0-9_-) and has the same number of unique options in just 22 symbols instead of 36.

Fast. Nanoid is as fast as UUID but can be used in URLs.

Install with nuget:

PM> Install-Package Nanoid

The default method uses URL-friendly symbols (A-Za-z0-9_-) and returns an ID with 21 characters (to have a collision probability similar to UUID v4).

var id = Nanoid.Generate(); //=> "Uakgb_J5m9g-0JDMbcJqLJ"

Symbols -,.() are not encoded in the URL. If used at the end of a link they could be identified as a punctuation symbol.

If you want to reduce ID length (and increase collisions probability), you can pass the size as an argument:

var id = Nanoid.Generate(size: 10); //=> "IRFa-VaY2b"

If you want to change the ID's alphabet or length you can pass alphabet and size.

var id1 = Nanoid.Generate(Nanoid.Alphabets.LowercaseLettersAndDigits, 10); //=> "4f90d13a42"
var id2 = Nanoid.Generate("1234567890abcdef", 5); //=> "2x501"

You can find a variety of useful alphabets typically used for Nanoid generation in Nanoid.Alphabets.

To reason about the collision probabilities of a particular alphabet and id length combination, use the nanoid collision calculator.

By default, we use an internal global ThreadStatic wrapper over System.Security.Cryptography.RandomNumberGenerator to generate Nanoids in a cryptographically secure manner.

The ThreadStatic attribute ensures that you can safely generate ids across threads without having to pass in your own Random object, by creating a separate instance of our random number generator per thread. This method also avoids the need for any locks which ensures the id generation is fast as advertised.

You can replace the default safe random generator using the System.Random class. For instance, to use a seed-based generator you can do this:

var random = Random(10);
var id = Nanoid.Generate(random, Nanoid.Alphabets.Letters, 10) //=> "fbAeFaaDeb"

If you want to use your own global random number generator, make sure you are aware of the thread safety implications.

Also note that the global random number generator is lazily initialized on first usage. If you need to preload it you can call the Nanoid.GlobalRandom getter to force the initialization to happen at that moment on the current thread.

• ai - nanoid

The MIT License (MIT). Please see License File for more information.