[Q]:Generate Unique ID's

[Joe Francia]

achrist at easystreet.com wrote:

> I'd like to generate unique identifiers for database items,
> sort of like the ID's that MS uses for COM.  My purpose is 
> to have unique ID's (across multiple [distributed] installations of
> a program), so that databases can be combined, copied, carried off,
> re-acquinted, compared, re-synchronized, etc, with some prayer
> of not being totally munged.
> 
> Is there anything in the standard Python libs to generate an ID
> like those that Windows uses, which are guaranteed to be unique
> over all instances of everything, forever, no exceptions?  How 
> about an easy call to Windows (if I don't care about cross-platform)
> to have it generate one for me?  As this might happen every time
> a user presses enter, maybe even several times on some updates, 
> it would be nice if it never took more than (e.g.) 0.1 secs or so.
> 
> 
> Al

There's a CreateGuid() funtion in the pywintypes modules, which is part 
of the ActiveState python distribution (which includes the Win32 
Extensions):

 >>> import pywintypes
 >>> guid = pywintypes.CreateGuid()
 >>> print guid
<iid:{9F0FF800-5596-4C91-BA8F-531973E8790A}>
 >>> print str(guid)[1:-1]
'9F0FF800-5596-4C91-BA8F-531973E8790A'