Is there a built in function equivalent to .NET's
Guid.NewGuid();
in Cocoa?
My desire is to produce a string along the lines of 550e8400-e29b-41d4-a716-446655440000
which represents a unique identifier.
Is there a built in function equivalent to .NET's
Guid.NewGuid();
in Cocoa?
My desire is to produce a string along the lines of 550e8400-e29b-41d4-a716-446655440000
which represents a unique identifier.
UUIDs are handled in Core Foundation, by the CFUUID library. The function you are looking for is CFUUIDCreate.
FYI for further searches: these are most commonly known as UUIDs, the term GUID isn't used very often outside of the Microsoft world. You might have more luck with that search term.
Some code:
For a string UUID, the following class method should do the trick:
+(NSString*)UUIDString {
CFUUIDRef theUUID = CFUUIDCreate(NULL);
CFStringRef string = CFUUIDCreateString(NULL, theUUID);
CFRelease(theUUID);
return [(NSString *)string autorelease];
}
if you really want the bytes (not the string):
+(CFUUIDBytes)UUIDBytes {
CFUUIDRef theUUID = CFUUIDCreate(NULL);
CFUUIDBytes bytes = CFUUIDGetUUIDBytes(theUUID);
CFRelease(theUUID);
return bytes;
}
where CFUUIDBytes is a struct of the UUID bytes.
At least on MacOSX 10.5.x you might use the command line tool "uuidgen" to get your string e.g.
$ uuidgen
054209C4-3873-4679-8104-3C18AE780512
there's also an option -hdr with this comand that conveniently generates it in header style
See man-page for further infos.
or there's the uuidgen
command line tool.
Since 10.8 you could also use: NSString *uuidString = [[NSUUID UUID] UUIDString];
Check out the Wikipedia article and the Core Foundation page.
Since 10.3 or so, you can use [[NSProcessInfo processInfo] globallyUniqueString]
. However, while this currently generates a UUID, it never has been and still isn't guaranteed to do that, so if you really need a UUID and not just any unique string, you should use CFUUID.