HumanHash

HumanHash provides human-readable representations of digests.

This is a port of duggan's ruby HumanHash implementation. Which is in turn a port of Jacon Carlson's ruby project which was originally based on Zachary Voase's Python implementation. So I can hardly take credit for this library as the work all belongs to those other great people and this is simply a port to the Crystal language.

Examples

icr(0.27.0)> require "./humanhash"
icr(0.27.0)> digest = "535061bddb0549f691c8b9c012a55ee2"
icr(0.27.0)> HumanHash.humanize(digest)
=> "alpha-twenty-mockingbird-twelve"
icr(0.27.0)>
icr(0.27.0)> h = HumanHash.uuid
icr(0.27.0)> h.human
=> "berlin-avocado-may-nebraska"
icr(0.27.0)> h.uuid
=> "f9c25578-55b8-46a8-bed5-40994056d10e"
icr(0.27.0)> h.digest
=> "6ffb57d425e64d3993b381104e7bdb99"

Installation

Add this to your application's shard.yml:

dependencies:
  humanhash:
    github: kingsleyh/humanhash

Caveats

Don't store the humanhash output, as its statistical uniqueness is only 256^words. Its intended use is as a human-readable (and, most importantly, memorable) representation of a longer digest, unique enough for display in a user interface, where a user may need to remember or verbally communicate the identity of a hash, without having to remember a 40-character hexadecimal sequence. Nevertheless, you should keep original digests around, then pass them through humanize() only as you're displaying them.

How It Works

The procedure for generating a humanhash involves compressing the input to a fixed length (default: 4 bytes), then mapping each of these bytes to a word in a pre-defined wordlist (a default wordlist is supplied with the library). This algorithm is consistent, so the same input, given the same wordlist, will always give the same output. You can also use your own wordlist, and specify a different number of words for output.

Contributing

1. Fork it (https://github.com/kingsleyh/humanhash/fork)
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create a new Pull Request

Contributors

• Kingsley Hendrickse - creator and maintainer