Encode current date into short unique string

I need to encode current datetime into some unique string to store it in database. I found this article how to generate a unique token which expires after 24 hours? but for me generated token is to long (34 symbols)

Is there some other similar way to encode shorter string?

Perfect size <= 10 symbols.

Jon Skeet
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Okay, if you want it from "about now" to some point in the future, and you want seconds granularity, and you want ASCII symbols, let's assume base64.

With 8 characters of base64, we can encode 6 bytes of data. That will give us 248 different values, which allows about 9 million years-worth of seconds. Given that range, we might as well use the DateTime.Ticks property and divide by ticks-per-second, not worrying about the epoch. Full code coming later if you want it, but as a list of steps:

  • Take DateTime.UtcNow.Ticks
  • Divide by TimeSpan.TicksPerSecond
  • Convert the result into a byte[], e.g. with BitConverter.GetBytes(long)
  • Encode the least-significant 6 bits (I'm hopeless with endianness - either the first or last 6 bytes of the byte[] as base64 using Convert.ToBase64String

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