Hacker News Reader

Use whatever encoding you want? Base64 is probably one of the most practical, but you're not obligated to use that.

UUIDs don't use base64

You can absolutely encode a UUID in base64, as you can any string of 128 bits.

128 random bits in some random format aren't a uuid. 0.2ml of water isn't a raindrop. If I say "you can provide me with a uuid" and you give me a base64-encoded string, it's getting rejected by validation. If I say "this text needs to be a Unicode string" and you give me a base64-encoded Unicode string's byte array, it's not going to go well.

Why are you implying that converting from base64 to and from standard UUID representation (hyphen-delimited hexadecimal) is more than a trivial operation? Either client or server can do this at any point.

Does Postgres not truly support UUID because it internally represents it as 128 bits instead of a huge number of encoded bytes in the standard representation? Of course not.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com