URL safe UUIDs in the smallest number of characters

Question

Ideally I would want something like example.com/resources/äFg4вNгё5, minimum number of visible characters, never mind that they have to be percent

Answer 1

Base-64 is good for this.

{098ef7bc-a96c-43a9-927a-912fc7471ba2}

could be encoded as

vPeOCWypqUOSepEvx0cbog

The usual equal-signs at the end could be dropped, as they always make the string-length a multiple of 4. And instead of + and /, you could use some safe characters. You can pick two from: - . _ ~

More information:

• RFC 4648
• Storing UUID as base64 String (Java)
• guid to base64, for URL (C#)
• Short GUID (C#)