Validating UUIDs with Regular Expressions in Java
Universally Unique Identifier (UUID) or UUIDs are a great way of providing practical randomness, for instance for tracking IDs or generated database keys.
I've worked with them a fair bit, and each time I end up working with them, I find myself needing to Google for the regular expression that works for Java.
In the spirit of blogumentation, I thought I'd document it for future me:
/**
* Regular expression, in {@link String} form, to match a Universally Unique Identifier (UUID), in
* a case-insensitive fashion.
*/
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.compile(UUID_STRING);
/**
* Regular expression, in {@link String} form, to match a Version 4 Universally Unique Identifier
* (UUID), in a case-insensitive fashion.
*/
public static final String UUID_V4_STRING =
"[a-fA-F0-9]{8}-[a-fA-F0-9]{4}-4[a-fA-F0-9]{3}-[89abAB][a-fA-F0-9]{3}-[a-fA-F0-9]{12}";
/**
* Regular expression to match a Version 4 Universally Unique Identifier (UUID), in a
* case-insensitive fashion.
*/
public static final Pattern UUID_V4 = Pattern.compile(UUID_V4_STRING);
These are an extract from the Apache-2.0 licensed java library uuid.
