squids 📦

squids: Short Quasi-Unique Identifiers (🦑 SQUIDs)

The pkgdown website for this project is located at https://squids.opens.science.

It is often useful to produce short, quasi-unique identifiers (🦑 SQUIDs) without the benefit of a central authority to prevent duplication. Although Universally Unique Identifiers (UUIDs) provide for this, these are also unwieldy; for example, the most used UUID, version 4, is 36 characters long. 🦑 SQUIDs are short (8 characters) at the expense of having more collisions, which can be mitigated by combining them with human-produced suffixes, yielding relatively brief, half human-readable, almost-unique identifiers (see for example the identifiers used for Decentralized Construct Taxonomies; Peters & Crutzen, 2024, doi.org/mr4n). 🦑 SQUIDs are the number of centiseconds elapsed since the beginning of 1970 converted to a base 30 system. This package contains functions to produce 🦑 SQUIDs as well as convert them back into dates and times.

Installation

You can install the released version of squids from CRAN with:

install.packages('squids');

You can install the development version of squids from Codeberg with:

remotes::install_git('https://codeberg.org/r-packages/squids');

(assuming you have remotes installed; otherwise, install that first using the install.packages function)