The useId() hook in React

DanielFebruary 27, 2023February 28, 2023

React 18 added a new hook named useId(). Its only scope is to generate unique IDs.

For example, the below React code:

import { useId } from "react";

function App() {
  const myId = useId()
  // myId will have a value like ':r0:'

  return(<div>
    <input type="checkbox" id={myId} name="newsletter" />
    <label for={myId}>Subscribe to newsletter</label>
  </div>)
}

Will output this HTML:

<div>
    <input type="checkbox" id=":r0:" name="newsletter">
    <label for=":r0:">Subscribe to newsletter</label>
</div>

I find it a nice tool to reduce the mental load of figuring out unique values for id values.

Specifying a prefixes for useId()

You can also specify a prefix to be appended to the result of useId() by using the ReactDOM.createRoot(), and also gain some performance improvements for your React components.

import { useId } from "react";
import { createRoot } from 'react-dom/client'

function App() {
  const myId = useId()

  return(<div>
    <input type="checkbox" id={myId} name="newsletter" />
    <label for={myId}>Subscribe to newsletter</label>
  </div>)
}

const root = createRoot(document.getElementById('root'), {
  identifierPrefix: 'my-prefix-for-ids-'
});
root.render(<App />);

In this case, the output for useId() will be :my-prefix-for-ids-r0:.

You can checkout here the codepen for this example.