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How to check if variable contains valid UUID/GUID identifier?
I'm currently interested only in validating types 1 and 4, but it should not be a limitation to your answers.
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A valid UUID should have 5 sections separated by a dash ( - ) and in the first section it should have 8 characters, the second, third, and the fourth section should have 4 characters each, and the last section should have 12 characters with a total of 32 characters.
A GUID (in hex form) need not contain any alpha characters, though by chance it probably would. If you are targeting a GUID in hex form, you can check that the string is 32-characters long (after stripping dashes and curly brackets) and has only letters A-F and numbers.
The GUID designation is an industry standard defined by Microsoft to provide a reference number which is unique in any context. UUID is a term that stands for Universal Unique Identifier. Similarly, GUID stands for Globally Unique Identifier. So basically, two terms for the same thing.
*/ public static final String UUID_STRING = "[a-fA-F0-9]{8}-[a-fA-F0-9]{4}-[a-fA-F0-9]{4}-[a-fA-F0-9]{4}-[a-fA-F0-9]{12}"; /** * Regular expression to match any Universally Unique Identifier (UUID), in a case-insensitive * fashion. */ public static final Pattern UUID = Pattern.
Currently, UUID's are as specified in RFC4122. An often neglected edge case is the NIL UUID, noted here. The following regex takes this into account and will return a match for a NIL UUID. See below for a UUID which only accepts non-NIL UUIDs. Both of these solutions are for versions 1 to 5 (see the first character of the third block).
Therefore to validate a UUID...
/^[0-9a-f]{8}-[0-9a-f]{4}-[0-5][0-9a-f]{3}-[089ab][0-9a-f]{3}-[0-9a-f]{12}$/i ...ensures you have a canonically formatted UUID that is Version 1 through 5 and is the appropriate Variant as per RFC4122.
NOTE: Braces { and } are not canonical. They are an artifact of some systems and usages.
Easy to modify the above regex to meet the requirements of the original question.
HINT: regex group/captures
To avoid matching NIL UUID:
/^[0-9a-f]{8}-[0-9a-f]{4}-[1-5][0-9a-f]{3}-[89ab][0-9a-f]{3}-[0-9a-f]{12}$/i If you love us? You can donate to us via Paypal or buy me a coffee so we can maintain and grow! Thank you!
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