A new version of the ulid package is now on CRAN. The packages provides ‘universally (unique) lexicographically (sortable) identifiers’ – see the spec at GitHub for details on those – which offer sorting which uuids lack. The R package provides access via the standard C++ library, had been put together by Bob Rudis and is now maintained by me.
Mark Heckmann noticed that a ulid round trip of generating and unmarshalling swallowed subsecond informationm and posted on a well-known site I no longer go to. Duncan Murdoch was kind enough to open an issue to make me aware, and in it included the nice minimally complete verifiable example by Mark.
It turns out that this issue was known, documented upstream in two
issues and fixed in fork
by the authors of those issues, Chris Bove. It replaces
time_t as the value of record (constrained at the second
resolution) with a proper std::chrono object which offers
milliseconds (and much more, yay Modern C++). So I switched the two main
files of library to his, and updated the wrapper code to interface from
POSIXct to std::chrono object. And with that
we are in business. The original example of five ulids create 100
millisecond part, then unmarshalled and here printed as a
data.table as data.frame by default truncates
to seconds:
> library(ulid)
> gen_ulid <- \(sleep) replicate(5, {Sys.sleep(sleep); generate()})
> u <- gen_ulid(.1)
> df <- unmarshal(u)
> data.table::data.table(df)
ts rnd
<POSc> <char>
1: 2024-05-30 16:38:28.588 CSQAJBPNX75R0G5A
2: 2024-05-30 16:38:28.688 XZX0TREDHD6PC1YR
3: 2024-05-30 16:38:28.789 0YK9GKZVTED27QMK
4: 2024-05-30 16:38:28.890 SC3M3G6KGPH7S50S
5: 2024-05-30 16:38:28.990 TSKCBWJ3TEKCPBY0
>We updated the documentation accordingly, and added some new tests as well. The NEWS entry for this release follows.
Changes in version 0.4.0 (2024-06-03)
Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for this release. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can sponsor me at GitHub.
This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.
Happy to share that ulid is now (back) on CRAN. It provides universally unique identifiers that are lexicographically sortable, which improves over the more well-known uuid generators.
ulid is a neat little package put together by Bob Rudis a few years ago. It had recently drifted off CRAN so I offered to brush it up and re-submit it. And as tooted earlier today, it took just over an hour to finish that (after the lead up work I had done, including prior email with CRAN in the loop, the repo transfer from Bob’s to my ulid repo plus of course a wee bit of actual maintenance; see below for more).
The NEWS entry follows.
Changes in version 0.3.1 (2024-04-02)
New Maintainer
Deleted several repository files no longer used or needed
Added
.editorconfig,ChangeLogandcleanupConverted NEWS.md to NEWS.Rd
Simplified
R/ directory to one source fileSimplified
src/removing redundantMakevarsAdded
ulid()aliasUpdated / edited roxygen and README.md documention
Removed vignette which was identical to README.md
Switched continuous integration to GitHub Actions
Placed upstream (header-only) library into
src/ulid/Renamed single interface file to
src/wrapper
If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can sponsor me at GitHub.
This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.