The UUID identifier has been used in programming since the days a baby-faced David Walsh became a professional software engineer. My first exposure to UUIDs was via a ColdFusion app I inherited and … the less we say about that the better. In any event, I was recently surprised to see that JavaScript has the ability to create UUIDs.

Developers can use the native JavaScript crypto library to generate a UUID:

crypto.randomUUID() // '5872aded-d613-410e-841f-a681a6aa8d8b'
crypto.randomUUID() // 'fe6c7438-a833-4c7c-9ea3-cdc84ef41dfc'
crypto.randomUUID() // 'e47a03d4-5da3-4451-a2c1-265de99cc2c1'
crypto.randomUUID() // '04cdadeb-0228-43db-85dc-ce7e960a6cde'

It’s important to remember that the UUID is not guaranteed to be unique, though the probability of repetition is incredibly low. I look forward to exploring the window.crypto API further to see what other cool things we can do!

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