How to turn CBUUID into string

Question

I can\'t find any official way to get a UUID string back out of a CBUUID. These UUIDs can be 2 or 16 bytes long.

The goal is to store CBUUIDs in a file somewhere as

Answer 1

I rigged up the following category to do this for CBUUID:

@interface CBUUID (StringExtraction)

- (NSString *)representativeString;

@end

@implementation CBUUID (StringExtraction)

- (NSString *)representativeString;
{
    NSData *data = [self data];

    NSUInteger bytesToConvert = [data length];
    const unsigned char *uuidBytes = [data bytes];
    NSMutableString *outputString = [NSMutableString stringWithCapacity:16];

    for (NSUInteger currentByteIndex = 0; currentByteIndex < bytesToConvert; currentByteIndex++)
    {
        switch (currentByteIndex)
        {
            case 3:
            case 5:
            case 7:
            case 9:[outputString appendFormat:@"%02x-", uuidBytes[currentByteIndex]]; break;
            default:[outputString appendFormat:@"%02x", uuidBytes[currentByteIndex]];
        }

    }

    return outputString;
}

@end

For this input:

NSLog(@"UUID string: %@", [[CBUUID UUIDWithString:@"0bd51666-e7cb-469b-8e4d-2742f1ba77cc"] representativeString]);
NSLog(@"UUID string2: %@", [[CBUUID UUIDWithString:@"1800"] representativeString]);

it produces the following output:

UUID string: 0bd51666-e7cb-469b-8e4d-2742f1ba77cc
UUID string2: 1800

and preserves the appropriate hyphenation for the 16 byte UUIDs, while supporting the simple 2-byte UUIDs.