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.


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




-i