UUID should support to and from standard uuid formats.

[kelvinhammond]

The UUID format should support converting to and from the standard display format(s).
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universally_unique_identifier#Format

https://github.com/openzim/libzim/blob/master/src/uuid.cpp

Currently there is not a good way to display the UUID to the user or application and then load that UUID back to a zim::UUID

[kelson42]

I agree with this request, this one I made more than 10 years ago and I still think this would be handy... at least the one to get a printable string.

[mgautierfr]

Despite its name, zim's uuid is only a unique id stored in 128 bits, it is not a standard UUID (which is also a unique id stored in 128 bits, but with more constraints)
None of the zim's uuid generated by libzim are valid standard UUID.

But anyway, there is already a (two) way(s) to convert a uuid to "standard" formats 8-4-4-4-12 (https://github.com/openzim/libzim/blob/master/src/uuid.cpp#L86-L110)
The operator << to print a UUID into a stream and the string operator to convert a UUID to a string.

UUID can also be constructed from raw binary data (which is not a standard representation). We could indeed add a constructor from a textual representation 8-4-4-4-12 to help manipulation of the uuid.

[kelson42]

@kelvinhammond Good enough?

[kelvinhammond]

I'll bind this to nodejs as is and whatever library wants to use setUuid will have to figure out which chars to send. This should suffice.

[kelson42]

@mgautierfr Would that be a good id that in the future we allow only proper uuids?

[mgautierfr]

I don't see the added value to this. We would need to depend on a uuid library to generate the uuid (or check it is a valid one) and it would be useless (old zim files would still have invalid uuid so we couldn't convert zim uuid to standard UUID)

[kelson42]

@mgautierfr The README.md states that we already depends of libuuid? Is that true? I don’t see any trace of a check in the Meson configuration file!

[mgautierfr]

It is false. We don't use libuuid.

[kelson42]

@kelvinhammond It seems we have a way in the libzim to print the UUID. Does the answer of @mgautierfr is satisfying to you?