Short Quasi-Unique Identifiers (SQUIDs)
Add a column with SQUIDs to a data frame
Conversion between base10 and base30
Concatenate to screen without spaces
Check for presence of a package
Extract SQUIDs from a character vector
Finding extreme (highest or lowest) SQUIDs
Get the current origin for each reuse
Get the next SQUID (or SQUIDs)
Options for the squids package
Convert an origin (a timestamp) to a SQUID
Repeat a string a number of times
Set or get a SQUID (to follow)
Converting ORCIDs to ShORCIDs and vice versa
Short Quasi-Unique Identifiers ('SQUIDs')
Generate short quasi-unique identifiers (SQUIDs)
Convert a timestamp to a SQUID
Converting SQUIDs back to timestamps and dates/times
Easily parse a vector into a character value
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:10.15626/MP.2022.3638>). 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.