JMN 2026-05-26
Sqids (pronounced "squids") is a small library that lets you generate YouTube-looking IDs from numbers. It's good for link shortening, fast & URL-safe ID generation and decoding back into numbers for quicker database lookups.
There are implementations in many programming languages.
Note that this is not a cryptographic function - it is more like base64 encoding
I made a Tcl implementation that is currently at: https://github.com/juliannoble/sqids-tcl/tree/jn
There is a pull request to hopefully make this available at the sqids tcl url: https://github.com/sqids/sqids-tcl