Nano ID Generator & Validator

Nano ID is a tiny (130 bytes), modern, URL-safe unique identifier library designed as a faster and more compact alternative to UUID. While UUID v4 always produces a 36-character hexadecimal string (32 hex digits + 4 hyphens), Nano ID defaults to 21 characters using a 64-character URL-safe alphabet. This gives it a smaller footprint while maintaining equivalent or superior collision resistance. UUID v4 has 122 bits of randomness; a 21-character Nano ID with the default alphabet provides ~126 bits.

Yes. The official Nano ID implementation uses the CSPRNG (Cryptographically Secure Pseudo-Random Number Generator) available in each runtime. In browsers, this is the Web Crypto API's `crypto.getRandomValues()` function, which is backed by OS-level entropy sources. ToolZeno's generator uses the official `nanoid` package's `customAlphabet` function, which internally calls `crypto.getRandomValues`, making every generated ID cryptographically random and safe for use as session tokens, database keys, and API identifiers.

The default length of 21 characters with the 64-character alphabet is carefully chosen to be equivalent in collision resistance to UUID v4. For most use cases — database primary keys, session tokens, URL slugs — 21 characters is the recommended length. If you need shorter IDs for user-visible codes (such as invite links), 8–12 characters are workable for low-volume systems. For high-security secrets, API keys, or tokens, 32–64 characters provides overwhelming uniqueness well beyond any practical collision risk.

With the default 21-character length and 64-character alphabet, you would need to generate approximately 17 billion IDs before reaching a 1% probability of any collision occurring (the birthday problem). For comparison, UUID v4 reaches this threshold at a similar scale. If your system generates thousands of IDs per second, you won't encounter statistical collision issues even over decades of operation. For higher volumes, simply increasing the length provides exponentially more headroom.

Yes. One of Nano ID's key advantages over UUID is full alphabet customization. You can use any set of unique characters as your alphabet — for example, uppercase-only letters for human-readable codes, numeric-only for PIN codes, or a custom character set that excludes visually ambiguous characters (like O vs 0, l vs 1). The critical constraint is that every character in your custom alphabet must be unique — duplicates would skew the randomness distribution and reduce effective entropy. ToolZeno validates your custom alphabet in real time.

Nano ID defaults to the URL-safe character set (`A-Za-z0-9_-`) to allow IDs to be used directly in URLs, file names, database keys, and HTML attributes without any encoding or escaping. UUID uses hexadecimal (0-9, a-f) which is also URL-safe, but its 36-character string is nearly twice as long as a Nano ID. The URL-safe Nano ID gives you shorter, more compact IDs that still work everywhere a UUID would.

ToolZeno supports bulk generation from 1 to 10,000 Nano IDs in a single click. The workspace automatically optimizes view modes: for small batches (<= 150), an interactive list with individual copy and search is shown; for larger batches, a high-performance raw text area is used for smooth browser rendering. All 10,000 IDs are generated in a single pass using a pre-compiled nanoid factory, typically completing in under 100ms on modern hardware.