How to create a GUID/UUID in Python

Question or problem about Python programming:

How do I create a GUID in Python that is platform independent? I hear there is a method using ActivePython on Windows but it’s Windows only because it uses COM. Is there a method using plain Python?

How to solve the problem:

Solution 1:

The uuid module, in Python 2.5 and up, provides RFC compliant UUID
generation. See the module docs and the RFC for details. [source]

Docs:

• Python 2: http://docs.python.org/2/library/uuid.html
• Python 3:
  https://docs.python.org/3/library/uuid.html

Example (working on 2 and 3):

>>> import uuid >>> uuid.uuid4() UUID('bd65600d-8669-4903-8a14-af88203add38') >>> str(uuid.uuid4()) 'f50ec0b7-f960-400d-91f0-c42a6d44e3d0' >>> uuid.uuid4().hex '9fe2c4e93f654fdbb24c02b15259716c' 

Solution 2:

If you’re using Python 2.5 or later, the uuid module is already included with the Python standard distribution.

Ex:

>>> import uuid >>> uuid.uuid4() UUID('5361a11b-615c-42bf-9bdb-e2c3790ada14') 

Solution 3:

Copied from : https://docs.python.org/2/library/uuid.html (Since the links posted were not active and they keep updating)

>>> import uuid >>> # make a UUID based on the host ID and current time >>> uuid.uuid1() UUID('a8098c1a-f86e-11da-bd1a-00112444be1e') >>> # make a UUID using an MD5 hash of a namespace UUID and a name >>> uuid.uuid3(uuid.NAMESPACE_DNS, 'python.org') UUID('6fa459ea-ee8a-3ca4-894e-db77e160355e') >>> # make a random UUID >>> uuid.uuid4() UUID('16fd2706-8baf-433b-82eb-8c7fada847da') >>> # make a UUID using a SHA-1 hash of a namespace UUID and a name >>> uuid.uuid5(uuid.NAMESPACE_DNS, 'python.org') UUID('886313e1-3b8a-5372-9b90-0c9aee199e5d') >>> # make a UUID from a string of hex digits (braces and hyphens ignored) >>> x = uuid.UUID('{00010203-0405-0607-0809-0a0b0c0d0e0f}') >>> # convert a UUID to a string of hex digits in standard form >>> str(x) '00010203-0405-0607-0809-0a0b0c0d0e0f' >>> # get the raw 16 bytes of the UUID >>> x.bytes '\x00\x01\x02\x03\x04\x05\x06\x07\x08\t\n\x0b\x0c\r\x0e\x0f' >>> # make a UUID from a 16-byte string >>> uuid.UUID(bytes=x.bytes) UUID('00010203-0405-0607-0809-0a0b0c0d0e0f') 

Solution 4:

I use GUIDs as random keys for database type operations.

The hexadecimal form, with the dashes and extra characters seem unnecessarily long to me. But I also like that strings representing hexadecimal numbers are very safe in that they do not contain characters that can cause problems in some situations such as ‘+’,’=’, etc..

Instead of hexadecimal, I use a url-safe base64 string. The following does not conform to any UUID/GUID spec though (other than having the required amount of randomness).

import base64 import uuid # get a UUID - URL safe, Base64 def get_a_uuid(): r_uuid = base64.urlsafe_b64encode(uuid.uuid4().bytes) return r_uuid.replace('=', '') 

Solution 5:

If you need to pass UUID for a primary key for your model or unique field then below code returns the UUID object –

 import uuid uuid.uuid4() 

If you need to pass UUID as a parameter for URL you can do like below code –

import uuid str(uuid.uuid4()) 

If you want the hex value for a UUID you can do the below one –

import uuid uuid.uuid4().hex 

Hope this helps!