Storing UUID as base64 String

You can safely drop the padding "==" in this application. If you were to decode the base-64 text back to bytes, some libraries would expect it to be there, but since you are just using the resulting string as a key, it's not a problem.

I'd use Base-64 because its encoding characters can be URL-safe, and it looks less like gibberish. But there's also Base-85. It uses more symbols and codes 4 bytes as 5 characters, so you could get your text down to 20 characters.

I was also trying to do something similar. I am working with a Java application which uses UUIDs of the form 6fcb514b-b878-4c9d-95b7-8dc3a7ce6fd8 (which are generated with the standard UUID lib in Java). In my case I needed to be able to get this UUID down to 30 characters or less. I used Base64 and these are my convenience functions. Hopefully they will be helpful for someone as the solution was not obvious to me right away.

Usage:

String uuid_str = "6fcb514b-b878-4c9d-95b7-8dc3a7ce6fd8";
String uuid_as_64 = uuidToBase64(uuid_str);
System.out.println("as base64: "+uuid_as_64);
System.out.println("as uuid: "+uuidFromBase64(uuid_as_64));

Output:

as base64: b8tRS7h4TJ2Vt43Dp85v2A
as uuid  : 6fcb514b-b878-4c9d-95b7-8dc3a7ce6fd8

Functions:

import org.apache.commons.codec.binary.Base64;

private static String uuidToBase64(String str) {
    Base64 base64 = new Base64();
    UUID uuid = UUID.fromString(str);
    ByteBuffer bb = ByteBuffer.wrap(new byte[16]);
    bb.putLong(uuid.getMostSignificantBits());
    bb.putLong(uuid.getLeastSignificantBits());
    return base64.encodeBase64URLSafeString(bb.array());
}
private static String uuidFromBase64(String str) {
    Base64 base64 = new Base64(); 
    byte[] bytes = base64.decodeBase64(str);
    ByteBuffer bb = ByteBuffer.wrap(bytes);
    UUID uuid = new UUID(bb.getLong(), bb.getLong());
    return uuid.toString();
}