Naming avoiding ambiguity automatically assigning valid identifiers

Naaaavi (pronounced nah-vee as if someone hadn't injected a load of ambiguous confusing a characters) is a simple Python tool for generating identifiers. It is an ambitious attempt to solve one of the most difficult problems in computer science: naming things. Naaavi attempts to generate identifiers that:

• use a character set (or other system) that aims to be human-friendly
• can be checksummed
• avoid ambiguity by testing the identifier against several rejectors
• are somewhat chronologically sortable
• are generated in a predictable fashion

It generates human-friendly identifiers using diceware (soon) or the zbase32 alphabet, and allows for screening of common sources of confusion such as look-alike pairs and repetitive characters. Naaaavi also provides limited support for generating ZPL to print your nice new identifiers.

Naaaavi does not:

• randomly generate identifiers
• encode anything into the identifiers
• generate universally or globally unique identifiers

$ naaaavi generate --alphabet zbase32 --checksum luhn_mod_n --size 5 --rejectors max_repeats:2 min_unique:3 ismp_flips: better_profanity: -n 10 --prefix 'HOOT-' --upper
HOOT-YYBYN4     HOOT-YYBYN      4       zbase32 luhn_mod_n      max_repeats:2;min_unique:3;ismp_flips:;better_profanity:        0.4.1
HOOT-YYBYDA     HOOT-YYBYD      A       zbase32 luhn_mod_n      max_repeats:2;min_unique:3;ismp_flips:;better_profanity:        0.4.1
HOOT-YYBYRS     HOOT-YYBYR      S       zbase32 luhn_mod_n      max_repeats:2;min_unique:3;ismp_flips:;better_profanity:        0.4.1
HOOT-YYBYFW     HOOT-YYBYF      W       zbase32 luhn_mod_n      max_repeats:2;min_unique:3;ismp_flips:;better_profanity:        0.4.1
HOOT-YYBYG1     HOOT-YYBYG      1       zbase32 luhn_mod_n      max_repeats:2;min_unique:3;ismp_flips:;better_profanity:        0.4.1
HOOT-YYBY8O     HOOT-YYBY8      O       zbase32 luhn_mod_n      max_repeats:2;min_unique:3;ismp_flips:;better_profanity:        0.4.1
HOOT-YYBYEQ     HOOT-YYBYE      Q       zbase32 luhn_mod_n      max_repeats:2;min_unique:3;ismp_flips:;better_profanity:        0.4.1
HOOT-YYBYJC     HOOT-YYBYJ      C       zbase32 luhn_mod_n      max_repeats:2;min_unique:3;ismp_flips:;better_profanity:        0.4.1
HOOT-YYBYKK     HOOT-YYBYK      K       zbase32 luhn_mod_n      max_repeats:2;min_unique:3;ismp_flips:;better_profanity:        0.4.1
HOOT-YYBYME     HOOT-YYBYM      E       zbase32 luhn_mod_n      max_repeats:2;min_unique:3;ismp_flips:;better_profanity:        0.4.1

$ naaaavi validate --alphabet zbase32 --checksum luhn_mod_n --barcodes HOOT-YYBYN.4 HOOT-YYBYN4 YYBYN4 YYBYM4 YYBYN5
HOOT-YYBYN.4    1
HOOT-YYBYN4     1
YYBYN4  1
YYBYM4  0
YYBYN5  0

• max_repeats will reject any identifier which repeats a particular symbol more than n times consecutively
• min_unique will reject any identifier that does not have at least n unique characters
• ismp_flips will reject any identifier that has at least one look alike pair noted as potentially confusing by the Institute for Safe Medication Practices
• ban_list will reject any identifier that has a prefix or suffix in your list
• regex_list will reject any identifier that searches positive against a list of regular expressions
• better_profanity (requires pip install better_profanity) will overzealously reject any identifier that could be mildly amusing
• not_exclusive will reject any identifier that exclusively contains a set of case-sensitive symbols

Naaaavi does not generate globally or universally unique identifiers, so please get in touch to make sure our (identifier) worlds don't collide.

The navi command is provided as a synonym of naaaavi so you don't have to remember that there are currently four a characters in naaaavi.