locators-0.3.0.3: Human exchangable identifiers and locators

MaintainerAndrew Cowie
StabilityExperimental
Safe HaskellNone
LanguageHaskell2010

Data.Locator

Contents

Description

Background

We had a need for identifiers that could be used by humans.

The requirement to be able to say these over the phone complicates matters. Most people have approached this problem by using a phonetic alphabet. The trouble comes when you hear people saying stuff like "A as in ... uh, Apple?" (should be Alpha, of course) and "U as in ... um, what's a word that starts with U?" It gets worse. Ever been to a GPG keysigning? Listen to people attempt to read out the digits of their key fingerprints. ...C 3 E D 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 2 B D B D... "Did you say 'C' or 'D'?" and "how many zeros was that?" Brutal.

So what we need is a symbol set where each digit is unambigious and doesn't collide with the phonetics of another symbol. This package provides English16, a set of 16 letters and numbers that, when spoken in English, have unique pronounciation and have been very successful in verbal communications over noisy links.

Ironically, however, when used in written applications the English16 set is a bit restrictive. When looking at them they don't have much variety (it turned out they're very blocky—so much so you have to squint). If the application is transcription or identification visually then the criteria is shapes that are distinct, rather than their sound. For these uses we provide Latin25, a set of 25 symbols useful for identifiers in automated systems that nevertheless have to be operated or debugged by humans.

Finally, also included is code to work in base 62, which is simply ['0'-'9', 'A'-'Z', and 'a'-'z']. These are frequently used to express short codes in URL redirectors; you may find them a more useful encoding for expressing numbers than base 16 hexidecimal.

Synopsis

English16: locators humans can exchange

This was somewhat inspired by the record locators used by the civilian air travel industry, but with the restriction that the symbol set is carefully chosen (aviation locators do heroic things like excluding 'I' but not much else) and, in the case of Locator16a, to not repeat symbols. They're not a reversable encoding, but assuming you're just generating identifiers and storing them somewhere, they're quite handy.

TODO link to paper with pronunciation study when published.

class (Ord α, Enum α, Bounded α) => Locator α where Source #

data English16 Source #

A symbol set with sixteen uniquely pronounceable digits.

The fact there are sixteen symbols is more an indication of a certain degree of bullheaded-ness on the part of the author, and less of any kind of actual requirement. We might have a slighly better readback score if we dropped to 15 or 14 unique characters. It does mean you can match up with hexidecimal, which is not entirely without merit.

The grouping of letters and numbers was the hard part; having come up with the set and deconflicted the choices, the ordering is then entirely arbitrary. Since there are some numbers, might as well have them at the same place they correspond to in base 10; the letters were then allocated in alpha order in the remaining slots.

Constructors

Zero

'0' 0th

One

'1' 1st

Two

'2' 2nd

Charlie

'C' 3rd

Four

'4' 4th

Foxtrot

'F' 5th

Hotel

'H' 6th

Seven

'7' 7th

Eight

'8' 8th

Nine

'9' 9th

Kilo

'K' 10th

Lima

'L' 11th

Mike

'M' 12th

Romeo

'R' 13th

XRay

'X' 14th

Yankee

'Y' 15th

fromEnglish16 :: [Char] -> Int Source #

Given a number encoded in Locator16, convert it back to an integer.

toEnglish16 :: Int -> String Source #

Given a number, convert it to a string in the English16 base 16 symbol alphabet. You can use this as a replacement for the standard '0'-'9' 'A'-'F' symbols traditionally used to express hexidemimal, though really the fact that we came up with 16 total unique symbols was a nice co-incidence, not a requirement.

toEnglish16a :: Int -> Int -> String Source #

Represent a number in English16a format. This uses the Locator16 symbol set, and additionally specifies that no symbol can be repeated. The a in Locator16a represents that this transformation is done on the cheap; when converting if we end up with '9' '9' we simply pick the subsequent digit in the enum, in this case getting you '9' 'K'.

Note that the transformation is not reversible. A number like 4369 (which is 0x1111, incidentally) encodes as 12C4. So do 4370, 4371, and 4372. The point is not uniqueness, but readibility in adverse conditions. So while you can count locators, they don't map continuously to base10 integers.

The first argument is the number of digits you'd like in the locator; if the number passed in is less than 16^limit, then the result will be padded.

>>> toEnglish16a 6 4369
12C40F

hashStringToEnglish16a :: Int -> ByteString -> ByteString Source #

Take an arbitrary sequence of bytes, hash it with SHA1, then format as a short digits-long Locator16 string.

>>> hashStringToLocator16a 6 "Hello World"
M48HR0

Latin25: a visually distinct character set

data Latin25 Source #

A symbol set with twenty-five visually distinct characters.

These are not protected against similar pronounciations; if you need to read your identifiers aloud use English16 instead.

Constructors

Zero'

'0' 0th

One'

'1' 1st

Three'

'3' 2nd

Four'

'4' 3rd

Seven'

'7' 4th

Eight'

'8' 5th

Nine'

'9' 6th

Alpha'

'A' 7th

Charlie'

'C' 8th

Echo'

'E' 9th

Golf'

'G' 10th

Hotel'

'H' 11th

Juliet'

'J' 12th

Kilo'

'K' 13th

Lima'

'L' 14th

Mike'

'M' 15th

November'

'N' 16th

Papa'

'P' 17th

Sierra'

'S' 18th

Tango'

'T' 19th

Victor'

'V' 20th

Whiskey'

'W' 21st

XRay'

'X' 22nd

Yankee'

'Y' 23rd

Zulu'

'Z' 24th

fromLatin25 :: String -> Int Source #

Given a number encoded in Locator16, convert it back to an integer.

toLatin25 :: Int -> String Source #

Given a number, convert it to a string in the Latin25 base 25 symbol alphabet. This is useful for primary keys and object identifiers that you need to scan for in log output, for example.

hashStringToLatin25 :: Int -> ByteString -> ByteString Source #

Take an arbitrary sequence of bytes, hash it with SHA1, then format as a short limit-long Latin25 string.

>>> hashStringToLatin25 5 "You'll get used to it. Or, you'll have a psychotic episode"
XSAV1

17 characters is the widest hash you can request.

Base62: binary without punctuation

padWithZeros :: Int -> String -> String Source #

Utility function to prepend '0' characters to a string representing a number. This allows you to ensure a fixed width for numbers that are less than the desired width in size. This comes up frequently when representing numbers in other bases greater than 10 as they are inevitably presented as text, and not having them evenly justified can (at best) be ugly and (at worst) actually lead to parsing and conversion bugs.

hashStringToBase62 :: Int -> ByteString -> ByteString Source #

Take an arbitrary string, hash it, then pad it with zeros up to be a digits-long string in base 62.

You may be interested to know that the 160-bit SHA1 hash used here can be expressed without loss as 27 digits of base 62, for example:

>>> hashStringToBase62 27 "Hello World"
1T8Sj4C5jVU6iQXCwCwJEPSWX6u

Deprecated functions

fromLocator16 :: [Char] -> Int Source #

Deprecated: Use fromEnglish16 instead

toLocator16 :: Int -> String Source #

Deprecated: Use toEnglish16 instead

toLocator16a :: Int -> Int -> String Source #

Deprecated: Use toEnglish16a instead

hashStringToLocator16a :: Int -> ByteString -> ByteString Source #

Deprecated: Use hashStringToEnglish16a instead