UUID Functions — UUIDgenerate • uuid

UUIDgenerate generates new Universally Unique Identifiers. It can be either time-based or random.

UUIDparse parses one of more UUIDs it string form and converts them to other internal formats.

UUIDvalidate checks the valitiy of UUIDs in string form.

UUIDgenerate(use.time = NA, n = 1L, output = c("string", "raw", "uuid"))
UUIDparse(what, output = c("uuid", "string", "raw", "logical"))
UUIDvalidate(what)

Arguments

use.time: logical, if TRUE then time-based UUID is generated, if FALSE then a random UUID is generated, if NA then random one is generated if a sufficiently reliable source of random numbers can be found, otherwise a time-based UUID is generated.
n: integer, number of UUIDs to generate.
output: type of the output. Valid types are: "string" for a character vector with UUIDs in textual representation (always lowercase), "raw" for a vector or matrix of raw bytes, "uuid" for an object of the class UUID and "logical" which only reports failure/success of the parsing, but not the actual values.
what: character vector which will be parsed into UUIDs.

Value

UUIDgenerate and UUIDparse values depend on the

output argument as follows:

"string": character vector with each element UUID in lowercase form, for UUIDparse strings that cannot be parsed will result in NA values
"raw": raw vector with the UUIDs stores each as 16 bytes seqeuntially. If the output is more than one UUID then the result is a raw matrix with 16 rows and as many columns as there are input elements.
"uuid": object of the class UUID which is a vector of UUIDs in 128-bit internal representation.
"logical": only supported in UUIDparse and return code TRUE for valid UUID, FALSE for invalid input and NA for NA input.

UUIDvalidate is just a shorthand for

UUIDparse(what, output="logical").

Author

Simon Urbanek, based on libuuid by Theodore Ts'o.

Note

The first argument is not n for historical reasons, beause the first version did only generate a single UUID.

Examples

UUIDgenerate()
#> [1] "aaf401f1-8b01-4ce6-9c05-9ce5028ee693"
UUIDgenerate(TRUE)
#> [1] "d6ac37ce-3cae-11ee-ad82-0242ac110004"
UUIDgenerate(FALSE)
#> [1] "e8d49787-fe8e-4c7e-a858-9d032120ef76"

## see if the randomness is any good
length(unique(UUIDgenerate(n=1000)))
#> [1] 1000

## generate a native UUID vector
(u <- UUIDgenerate(n=3, output="uuid"))
#> UUID vector:
#> [1] "7a012ebc-21ea-4581-a635-33e553fb4b02"
#> [2] "3d8ce746-9c85-4a1a-95a7-0cc4e818629e"
#> [3] "ba8687e7-fdd4-4f94-8c1d-494ef80f9bac"

as.character(u)
#> [1] "7a012ebc-21ea-4581-a635-33e553fb4b02"
#> [2] "3d8ce746-9c85-4a1a-95a7-0cc4e818629e"
#> [3] "ba8687e7-fdd4-4f94-8c1d-494ef80f9bac"
as.raw(u[1])
#>  [1] 7a 01 2e bc 21 ea 45 81 a6 35 33 e5 53 fb 4b 02

UUIDgenerate(output="raw")
#>  [1] 8d 58 9a 63 b6 2a 46 48 8d c0 03 ed 0b 59 23 e6

## see ?UUID for more examples on UUID objects