Here are some examples of typical usage of the uuid module:
>>> import uuid # make a UUID based on the host ID and current time >>> uuid.uuid1() UUID('a8098c1a-f86e-11da-bd1a-00112444be1e') # make a UUID using an MD5 hash of a namespace UUID and a name >>> uuid.uuid3(uuid.NAMESPACE_DNS, 'python.org') UUID('6fa459ea-ee8a-3ca4-894e-db77e160355e') # make a random UUID >>> uuid.uuid4() UUID('16fd2706-8baf-433b-82eb-8c7fada847da') # make a UUID using a SHA-1 hash of a namespace UUID and a name >>> uuid.uuid5(uuid.NAMESPACE_DNS, 'python.org') UUID('886313e1-3b8a-5372-9b90-0c9aee199e5d') # make a UUID from a string of hex digits (braces and hyphens ignored) >>> x = uuid.UUID('{00010203-0405-0607-0809-0a0b0c0d0e0f}') # convert a UUID to a string of hex digits in standard form >>> str(x) '00010203-0405-0607-0809-0a0b0c0d0e0f' # get the raw 16 bytes of the UUID >>> x.bytes '\x00\x01\x02\x03\x04\x05\x06\x07\x08\t\n\x0b\x0c\r\x0e\x0f' # make a UUID from a 16-byte string >>> uuid.UUID(bytes=x.bytes) UUID('00010203-0405-0607-0809-0a0b0c0d0e0f')