Validate

[zeke]

Adds a uuid.validate(str) method; derived from the comments in https://github.com/broofa/node-uuid/issues/41

[broofa]

Hey zeke, I know you pulled his from #41, where I offered this as a one-liner solution, but if we're going to add a regex-based validate() method, it should conform as closely as possible to what RFC4122 does/doesn't allow. Specifically:

• Allow upper case chars on input (http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4122#section-3, bottom of pg 2)
• Disallow non-hyphenated IDs (http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4122#section-3, top of pg 3)
• Disallow Ids with invalid version (http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4122#section-4.1.3) and variant (http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4122#section-4.1.1) fields

Thus, this regex:

/^[0-9a-fA-F]{8}-[0-9a-fA-F]{4}-[1-5][0-9a-fA-F]{3}-[89ABab][0-9a-fA-F]{3}-[0-9a-fA-F]{12}$/

(edited: to add ^ & $ to regex)

[defunctzombie]

The more I think about this, the more I fall on the side that this belongs in a separate lib. Possibly one of the web framework validation checker libs that already exist. Then again, the method implementation is so tiny that having it here might not be an issue.

[broofa]

@shtylman - yeah, that's kind of where my heads been at. This is the 3rd or 4th request for uuid validation I've had though, and I can see why it'd be nice to have here. But validation is a slippery slope; I expect everyone has slightly different requirements. I don't know if my suggested regex above is actually useful to anyone, or if it's just an interesting example that people are likely to want to modify to meet their specific needs.

(And I wouldn't be surprised if it leads to more issues than it solves, as people bitch about it rejecting uuids that look right, but that have invalid version/variant fields. That's probably just a documentation issue though.)

[zeke]

I just came across a module called validator that appears to have some UUID validations built in: https://github.com/zeke/node-validator/blob/afd1a45b018880d1cb627055d9722a5c7f3cc822/test/validator.test.js#L403

Maybe I should use that instead of trying to get this PR merged into node-uuid?