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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-23T15:16:37+00:00

I am trying to generate a unique identifier of a fixed length such as

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I am trying to generate a unique identifier of a fixed length such as the IDs that are generated by Megaupload for the uploaded files.

For example:

  • ALGYTAB5
  • BCLD23A6

In this example using from A-Z and 0-9 and with a fixed length of 8 the total different combinations are 2,821,109,907,456.

What if one of the generated id is already taken. Those ids are going to be stored in a database and it shouldn’t be used more than once.

How can I achieve that in Java?

Thank you.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Hmm… You could imitate a smaller GUID the following way. Let first 4 bytes of your string be the encoded current time – seconds passed after Unix. And the last 4 just a random combination. In this case the only way two ID’s would coincide is that they were built at the same second. And the chances of that would be very veeery low because of the other 4 random characters.

    Pseudocode:

    get current time (4 byte integer
id[0] = 1st byte of current time (encoded to be a digit or a letter)
id[1] = 2nd
id[2] = 3rd
id[3] = 4th
id[4] = random character
id[5] = random character
id[6] = random character
id[7] = random character
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