ryanuber / shortstr

shortstr

shortstr is a Golang library which can be used to shorten strings or struct field values while still providing reasonable uniqueness guarantees. It provides a two-way mapping which can take a long string and return a shorter version, as well as taking a shortened string and returning the full version.

A practical example would be shortening human-facing UUID's. A UUID is a very convenient way to assign a unique ID to an object, but because of its uniqueness guarantees, it suffers from human grok-ability, and is near impossible to remember when presented with long lists. Often times computer operators will memorize a short segment, perhaps the first 4 to 8 characters, and that is usually enough to uniquely identify the object in question. This library aims to make using these shortened forms easy while still retaining uniqueness guarantees and the ability to map abbreviated values back to their original, full-sized values.

Performance

Internally shortstr uses [radix trees] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radix_tree) to optimize prefix lookups. A radix tree provides O(k) operations, which have search times comparable to a hash table. shortstr may perform multiple lookups to determine the shortest possible match for a string. The implementation used in this library is go-radix.

Example usage

type Thing struct {
    Name string
}

data := []Thing{
    Thing{"aaaaaaaa"},
    Thing{"aaaabbbb"},
}

// Create the shortener with an initial data set
s := shortstr.New(data, "Name")

// Basic shorten/expand
println(s.Shortest("aaaabbbb"))         // "aaaab"
println(s.ShortestChunk("aaaabbbb", 6)) // "aaaabb"
println(s.Expand("aaaab"))              // "aaaabbbb"

// Add more data items to the set
s.Add(Thing{"aaaabbcc"})

// Remove data items
s.Remove(Thing{"aaaabbcc"})

It is also possible to create the shortener using a slice of strings:

data := []string{
    "aaaaaa",
    "aabbbb",
    "aacccc",
}
s := shortstr.NewStrings(data)