Question

I am looking for a way to find a Guid within a string that is in a .NET recognizable pattern.

There are a few regex’s available in this popular library, but I can’t find one that works for all of the possible Guids outlined here in this MSDN article.

For example, lets say I have a string like this:

ACTIVITY: “{0xCA761232, 0xED42, 0x11CE, {0xBA, 0xCD, 0x00, 0xAA, 0x00, 0x57, 0xB2, 0x23}}”, Time:09:09:09:09

This should return:

{0xCA761232, 0xED42, 0x11CE, {0xBA, 0xCD, 0x00, 0xAA, 0x00, 0x57, 0xB2, 0x23}}

Another example could be:

Random string CA761232-ED42-11CE-BACD-00AA0057B223 random string

This should return:

CA761232-ED42-11CE-BACD-00AA0057B223

Any ideas on how to approach this? Is regular expressions the way to go here?

Answer 1

Solution is:

using System;
using System.Text.RegularExpressions;

class Program
{
  static void Main()
  {
    string input = "Random string CA761232-ED42-11CE-BACD-00AA0057B223 random string";
    Match match = Regex.Match(input,
      @"((?:(?:\s*\{*\s*(?:0x[\dA-F]+)\}*\,?)+)|(?<![a-f\d])[a-f\d]{32}(?![a-f\d])|" +
      @"(?:\{\(|)(?<![A-F\d])[A-F\d]{8}(?:\-[A-F\d]{4}){3}\-[A-F\d]{12}(?![A-F\d])(?:\}|\)|))");
    if (match.Success)
    {
      string key = match.Groups[1].Value;
      Console.WriteLine(key);
    }
    else
    {
      Console.WriteLine("NO MATCH");
    }
  }
}

See and test this code here.