uuid-color

A lightweight package to deterministically generate unique and uniformly sampled colors from UUIDs.

How it works

The RGB color space is represented by hexadecimal numbers in the 0x000000 to 0xffffff range. We use a simple modulo hash function (% (0xffffff + 0x000001) i.e. % 0x100000) to produce numbers in that range from the decimal representation of the UUID (a base 10 39-digit integer). We then extract the red, green, and blue components from the resulting hash (which represents a specific color in hexadecimal notation) using bit masks.

Limitations

Since the color space is only 256^3 whereas the UUID space is much larger (approximtely 5.3 x 10^36 possible UUIDs), it is impossible to create a complete bijection between the spaces, and so collisions in the generated color space can occur. This package does however guarantee that the color space is maximally utilized, assuming a uniform distribution of the input UUIDs within the UUID space.

Installation:

npm i uuid-color

Usage

import { v4 as uuidv4 } from "uuid";
import { colorFromUuid } from "uuid-color";

const myUuid = uuidv4();

// returns a hex color code as a string "#rrggbb"
const hexColor = colorFromUuid(myUuid);

Live demo

Reference - v0.1.0

Table of contents

Interfaces

• Options

Functions

• colorFromUuid

Functions

colorFromUuid

▸ colorFromUuid(uuid, options?): string

Returns the generated color associated with the given uuid.

throws Error This exception is thrown if the input uuid string is not a valid UUID.

Parameters

Name	Type	Description
uuid	string	The uuid for which to generate a color
options	Options	An optional object to configure the color generation, and attach callbacks that directly receive the generated color code or components in various formats

Returns

string

The generated color as a CSS <color> notation string

Defined in

index.ts:81