Hi,

I'm pretty sure there is a number of options to achieve this, so I'm
asking here. I often need to generate small unique tokens (like for
invitation codes or unimportant authentication token).

In the past I've been using Digest::SHA1.hexdigest(some string) which
gives us something like "d2b7882fa08bb6de8dca62f16298683bfe4f0738".
It's not very user friendly though, and definitely not small.

More recently I've been using ActiveSupport::SecureRandom.base64(6)
which generates "Xst7JGF6" or "zXxWY/Y/", but sometimes it contains
non-url friendly characters like "/".

What do you use ? Is there a specific gem to achieve this in a robust
fashion (= making collisions unlikely, and specify the characters to
be used, like mixture of numbers and characters for instance ?)

cheers and thanks for your input,

Thibaut
--
http://blog.logeek.fr
http://evolvingworker.com