Java validation regex pattern for the OID root UID value

17-Jul-2015

I've been focusing on making sure that the input to my web services at work is correct. One of these inputs happens to be the root part of a HL7 OID, which is a dot-separated UID. The values look like this '1.2.3', '9.5.6.3.7774.1', etc. It's very similar to an IP address, but can have more than 4 parts.

This is a very simple pattern I'm using for validation. It assumes that the input is non-null and not an empty string.

Java

static final Pattern UID_PATTERN = Pattern.compile("[[0-9]+\\.]*");

...then to use it, I do something like this...

Java

if (!UID_PATTERN.matcher(myString).matches()) {

throw RuntimeException("String doesn't match the UID pattern");

}

-i

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