I'm looking for a way to generate codes/ids in my specs. I found barcodes, codes, and id numbers. None of these quite fit my purpose...or if I use them they will be misleading for the type of code I'm actually generating. Is there a generator that allows for a format specifier? For example, I'd like to generate a string with digits and dashes in a specified sequence, like #####-###-####-#####, for example.
Faker's numerify, letterify, and bothify seem like what you're looking for:
Faker::Base.numerify('###-###') # "203-099"
Faker::Base.letterify('???-???') # "ADB-VMZ"
Faker::Base.bothify('???-###') # "ISE-485"
Docs
Without thinking too hard about it I created a column of type [UUID] and successfully stored "strings" (as noted in the documentation, and generally referred to as a separate type altogether) returned from DB::generateKey in it.
Feels like I've done something I shouldn't have.
Can anyone share some light on this. Thanks in advance.
Mostly they return different types.
For clarity, DB::generateKey is equivalent to Uuid::generate |> toString
According to the standard library docs, it's the return type.
Uuid::generate() -> UUID
Generate a new UUID v4 according to RFC 4122
DB::generateKey() -> Str
Returns a random key suitable for use as a DB key
I believe the UUID type is a bitstring representation, that is, a specific sequence of bits in memory.
Whereas the Str type is a string representation of a UUID.
I've recently encountered all sorts of wrappers in Google's protobuf package. I'm struggling to imagine the use case. Can anyone shed the light: what problem were these intended to solve?
Here's one of the documentation links: https://developers.google.com/protocol-buffers/docs/reference/csharp/class/google/protobuf/well-known-types/string-value (it says nothing about what can this be used for).
One thing that will be different in behavior between this, and simple string type is that this field will be written less efficiently (a couple extra bytes, plus a redundant memory allocation). For other wrappers, the story is even worse, since the repeated variants of those fields will be written inefficiently (official Google's Protobuf serializer doesn't support packed encoding for non-numeric types).
Neither seems to be desirable. So, what's this all about?
There's a few reasons, mostly to do with where these are used - see struct.proto.
StringValue can be null, string often can't be in a language interfacing with protobufs. e.g. in Go strings are always set; the "zero value" for a string is "", the empty string, so it's impossible to distinguish between "this value is intentionally set to empty string" and "there was no value present". StringValue can be null and so solves this problem. It's especially important when they're used in a StructValue, which may represent arbitrary JSON: to do so it needs to distinguish between a JSON key which was set to empty string (StringValue with an empty string) or a JSON key which wasn't set at all (null StringValue).
Also if you look at struct.proto, you'll see that these aren't fully fledged message types in the proto - they're all generated from message Value, which has a oneof kind { number_value, string_value, bool_value... etc. By using a oneof struct.proto can represent a variety of different values in one field. Again this makes sense considering what struct.proto is designed to handle - arbitrary JSON - you don't know what type of value a given JSON key has ahead of time.
In addition to George's answer, you can't use a Protobuf primitive as the parameter or return value of a gRPC procedure.
I am writing an extension to my companies existing SNMP MIB. I have a whole list of objects, with the same properties on each. I want to be able to get and set these through SNMP.
So for example, consider my object has name, desc, arg0, arg1. What I want is to be able to refer to these as:
fullpath.objects.ObjectA.name
fullpath.objects.ObjectA.desc
fullpath.objects.ObjectA.arg0
fullpath.objects.ObjectB.name
fullpath.objects.ObjectB.desc
fullpath.objects.ObjectB.arg0
However the leaf nodes appear to have to have unique names, so I am unable to define this.
I can use a SNMP table to produce:
fullpath.objects.table.name.1
fullpath.objects.table.desc.1
fullpath.objects.table.arg0.1
fullpath.objects.table.name.2
fullpath.objects.table.desc.2
fullpath.objects.table.arg0.2
But there is nowhere to look up that 2 means ObjectB. This leaves it open to user error looking up the wrong value and setting the wrong thing.
At the moment the best solution I can see is:
fullpath.objects.ObjectAName
fullpath.objects.ObjectADesc
fullpath.objects.ObjectAArg0
fullpath.objects.ObjectBName
fullpath.objects.ObjectBDesc
fullpath.objects.ObjectBArg0
which involves defining name for every object (there are 20 or so of them). The set of objects is fixed, so this is ok...just not very tidy.
Is there some way to define names for index in the table?
Is there some way of defining a container type?
Is there some way of allowing leaf nodes to be non-unique?
Any other ideas?
You should definitely use SNMP tables to accomplish what is required. This is the only way.
MIB Object names must be unique within entire MIB file.
You can easily use object of OCTET STRING type as Table index. So each byte/symbol/char of OCTET STRING value will be translated to corresponding numeric ASCII code in OID.
I ended up just using a naming convention and adding each of the settings directly into the MIB.
Not really the answer I wanted, but it means that all of the settings show up in the MIB, and that reduces the chance of users setting the wrong setting.
My problem:
I'm looking for a way to represent a person's name and address as an encoded id. The id should contain only alpha-numeric characters, be collision-proof, and be represented in a smallest number of characters possible. My first thought was to simply use a cryptographic hash function like MD5 or SHA1, but this seems like overkill (security isn't important - doesn't need to be one-way) and I'd prefer to find something that would produce a shorter id. Does anyone know of an existing algorithm that fits this problem?
In other words, what is the best way to implement the following function so that the return value is the same consistently for the same input, collisions are unlikely, and ids are less than 20 characters?
>>> make_fake_id(fname = 'Oscar', lname = 'Grouch', stnum = '1', stname = 'Sesame', zip = '12345')
N1743123734
Application Context (for those that are interested):
This will be used for a record linkage app. Given an input name and address we search a very large database for the best match and return the database id and other data (how we do this is not important here). If there isn't a match I need to generate this psuedo/generated/derived id from the search input (entity's name and address data). Every search record should result in an output record with either a real (the actual database id resulting from a match/link) or this generated psuedo/generated/derived id. The psuedo id will be prefixed with a character (e.g. N) to differentiate it from a real id.
I know you said no to MD5 and SHA1, but I think you should consider them anyway. As well as being well studied hashing algorithms, the length gives you more protection against possible collisions. No hash is collision-proof, but the cryptographic ones generally are less collision-prone than something you couuld come up with yourself.
Use a cryptographic hash for its collision resistance, not its other qualities
Use as many bytes from the hash as you want (truncate)
convert to alpha-numeric characters
You can also truncate the alpha-numeric string instead of the hash
An easy way to do this: hash the data, encode in base64, remove all non-alpha-numeric characters, truncate.
N_HASH_CHARS = 11
import hashlib, re
def digest(name, address):
hash = hashlib.md5(name + "|" + address).digest().encode("base64")
alnum_hash = re.sub(r'[^a-zA-Z0-9]', "", hash)
return alnum_hash[:N_HASH_CHARS]
How many alpha-numeric characters should you keep? Each character gives you around 5.95 bits of entropy (log(62,2)). 11 characters give you 65.5 bits of entropy, which should be enough to avoid a collision for the first 2**32.7 users (about 7 billion).
A good solution is somewhat dependent on your application. Do you know how many users and what the set of all users is? If you provide more details you would get better help.
I agree with the other poster suggesting serial numbers. OTOH, if you really, really really want to do something else:
Create a SHA1 hash from the data, and store it in a table with a serial number field.
Then, when you get the data, calculate the hash, look it up on the table, get the serial, and that's your id. If it's not on the table, insert it.
I wonder whether you intend to "assign" these ids to the users? If so, I would expect your users to hate anything that you propose; who would want a user id of "AAAAA01"?
So, if these ids are visible to the user, then you should just let them pick what they like and check them for uniqueness (easy). If they are not visible to the user (e.g., internal primary key), then just generate them sequentially using an appropriate technique such as an Oracle Sequence or SQL Server AutoNumber (also easy).
If these ids are an attempt to detect a user that is registering more than once, then I would agree that you should consider a cryptographic hash followed by a full comparison of the registration data (name, address, etc.). However, to be usable, you will need to translate the data into a canonical form (standardized letter case, whitespace, canonical street address, etc.) before computing the hash or making the comparison. Otherwise, you will mismatch based on trivial differences.
EDIT: Now that I understand the problem space better based on your edits, I think that it is highly unlikely that your algorithm (so far) will catch most matches. Beyond my suggestion to canonicalize the inputs, I recommend that you consider an approach that results in a ranked list of a handful of possible matches (to be resolved by a human if possible) rather than an all-or-nothing attempt at a single match. In other words, I recommend a search approach rather than a lookup approach.
Is that feasible in your situation?
Well, if there's more than one person at the same address with the same name, you're toast here, (w/o adding code to detect this and add a discriminator of some kind).
but assuming that issue is not, then the street address and zip code portion of the full addresss is sufficient to guaranteee uniqueness there, so adding enough data from the name should take care of the issue...
Do you have access to a database, or other persistence mechanism, where you could generate and maintain key values for each address? Then keep the address and individual entities in two keyed dictionary structures, where the key is autogenerated for each new distinct address, person encountered... and then use the autogenerated alpha-numeric key...
You could use AAAAA01 for first person at first address,
AAAAA02 for second person at first address,
AAAAB07 for the seventh resident at the second adresss, etc.
If you donlt have any way to generate and maintain these entity-Key mappings then you need to use the full street address/Zip and fullNAme, or a hash value of the same, although the Hash value approach has a smnall chance of generating duplicates...