safe enough 8-character short unique random string

Question

I am trying to compute 8-character short unique random filenames for, let\'s say, thousands of files without probable name collision. Is this method safe enough?

Answer 1

I am using hashids to convert a timestamp into a unique id. (You can even convert it back to a timestamp if you want).

The drawback with this is if you create ids too fast, you will get a duplicate. But, if you are generating them with time in-between, then this is an option.

Here is an example:

from hashids import Hashids
from datetime import datetime
hashids = Hashids(salt = "lorem ipsum dolor sit amet", alphabet = "ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ1234567890")
print(hashids.encode(int(datetime.today().timestamp()))) #'QJW60PJ1' when I ran it