You say there "may" be duplicate names. So the name will be nearly unique. How about adding not an ID that's not globally unique, but distinguishes items with identical names from one another? You can just keep assigning larger numbers; it's unlikely you'll ever produce/stock over 4 million variants of the same product.

Makeshifts last the longest.

In reply to Re: Item Identification in XML Files by Aristotle
in thread Item Identification in XML Files by Anonymous Monk

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