Validate String UUID in Java

Overview

In this tutorial, we’re going to have a look at some ways of validating UUID (Universally Unique Identifier) strings in Java.

We’ll go through one of the UUID class methods, and then we’ll use regular expressions.

Using UUID.fromString()

One of the quickest ways of checking if a String is a UUID is by trying to map it using the static method fromString belonging to the UUID class. Let’s try it out:

@Test
void shouldReturnValidUUID_UsingUUIDFromString() {
    final String validUUID = "23c8fd18-078f-453e-8c9e-bade508c7132";
    Assertions.assertEquals(UUID.fromString(validUUID).toString(), validUUID);
}

@Test
void shouldThrowIllegalArgumentException_UsingUUIDFromString() {
    final String invalidUUID = "23c8fd18-078f-453e";
    Assertions.assertThrows(IllegalArgumentException.class, () -> UUID.fromString(invalidUUID));
}

In the above code snippet, we can see that in case the string we’re trying to validate doesn’t represent a UUID, then an IllegalArgumentException will be thrown. However, the method fromString will return 00000001-0001-0001-0001-000000000001 for strings such as 1-1-1-1-1. So we have included the string comparison to take care of this case.

Some might argue that using exceptions is not a good practice for flow control, so we’re going to see a different way of achieving the same result.

Using Regular Expressions

Another way of validating a UUID is to use a regular expression that will match exactly the format.

Firstly, we need to define a Pattern that will be used to match the string.

Pattern UUID_REGEX =
Pattern.compile("^[0-9a-fA-F]{8}-[0-9a-fA-F]{4}-[0-9a-fA-F]{4}-[0-9a-fA-F]{4}-[0-9a-fA-F]{12}$");

Then, we can use this pattern to try matching it to a string in order to validate whether or not it is a UUID:

@Test
public void whenUUIDIsValidatedUsingRegex_thenValidationSucceeds() {
Pattern UUID_REGEX =
Pattern.compile("^[0-9a-fA-F]{8}-[0-9a-fA-F]{4}-[0-9a-fA-F]{4}-[0-9a-fA-F]{4}-[0-9a-fA-F]{12}$");

    Assertions.assertTrue(UUID_REGEX.matcher("26929514-237c-11ed-861d-0242ac120002").matches());

    Assertions.assertFalse(UUID_REGEX.matcher("invalid-uuid").matches());
}

Conclusion

In this article, we’ve learned how to validate a UUID string by using regular expressions or by taking advantage of the static method of the UUID class.

As always, the code for these examples is available over on GitHub.