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What is a UUID?

A UUID (Universally Unique Identifier) is a 128-bit label standardised by RFC 4122. It is represented as 32 hexadecimal digits grouped in five sections separated by hyphens: 8-4-4-4-12.

UUIDs are designed to be unique across space and time without requiring a central registry, making them ideal for distributed systems, database primary keys, session tokens, and any situation where you need a unique ID without coordination.

UUID v4: random generation

Version 4 UUIDs are generated from random or pseudo-random numbers. Two bits are fixed (version and variant), and the remaining 122 bits are random, giving roughly 5.3 × 10³⁶ possible values.

The probability of generating a duplicate is astronomically low: you would need to generate about 2.7 × 10¹⁸ UUIDs before having a 50% chance of a single collision. This tool uses the browser's native crypto.randomUUID().

UUID v7 and ULID: sortable identifiers

Both v7 (RFC 9562) and ULID lead with a 48-bit millisecond timestamp, so IDs generated later always sort after earlier ones — useful as a database primary key, since it avoids the random-insert B-tree fragmentation that plain v4 causes.

The difference is encoding: v7 keeps the standard 8-4-4-4-12 hyphenated hex format, while ULID is a 26-character Crockford-base32 string with no dashes — shorter and case-insensitive to compare, but not a drop-in UUID.

Format variants

All three formats represent the same 128-bit value.

Standardxxxxxxxx-xxxx-4xxx-yxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx — lowercase, dashed
UppercaseSame, but A-F instead of a-f — some older systems require it
No-dash32-char string — URLs, filenames, limited-syntax databases

Frequently asked questions

v4 UUIDs come from crypto.randomUUID(), the browser's own cryptographically secure random source, not a seeded or custom algorithm. Nothing generated here is sent anywhere or kept beyond your current session.