Generating a unique identifier

[Marc 'BlackJack' Rintsch]

On Fri, 07 Sep 2007 12:03:23 +0000, Steven D'Aprano wrote:

> I have an application that will be producing many instances, using them 
> for a while, then tossing them away, and I want each one to have a unique 
> identifier that won't be re-used for the lifetime of the Python session.
> 
> I can't use the id() of the object, because that is only guaranteed to be 
> unique during the lifetime of the object.
> 
> For my application, it doesn't matter if the ids are predictable, so I 
> could do something as simple as this:
> 
> def unique_id():
>     n = 1234567890
>     while True:
>         yield n
>         n += 1
> 
> unique_id = unique_id()
> 
> while Application_Is_Running:
>     make_an_object(id=unique_id())
>     do_stuff_with_objects()
>     delete_some_of_them()
> 
> which is easy enough, but I thought I'd check if there was an existing 
> solution in the standard library that I missed.

For that easy solution you can use `itertools.count()`.

Ciao,
	Marc 'BlackJack' Rintsch