Why are there dashes in a .NET GUID?

Question

Why are there dashes in a .NET GUID? Are there dashes in most implementations of a GUID, or is it just a Microsoft thing?

Signed,

741ecf77-9c92-4435-8e6b-859

Answer 1

It's just a convenience.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GUID

Answer 2

That's just for convenience. GUID consists of 16 bytes which makes up 32 characters in hex text representation. Without hyphens GUIDs are harder to perceive by humans and harder to be recognized as GUIDs and not some random nature 16-byte numbers.

Answer 3

You can get your guid in various formats.

Assuming you're using c#:

Guid guid = Guid.NewGuid();

Console.WriteLine(guid.ToString("N"))

63be6f7e4e564f0580229f958f492077

Console.WriteLine(guid.ToString("D"))

63be6f7e-4e56-4f05-8022-9f958f492077

Console.WriteLine(guid.ToString("B"))

{63be6f7e-4e56-4f05-8022-9f958f492077}

Console.WriteLine(guid.ToString("P"))

(63be6f7e-4e56-4f05-8022-9f958f492077)

Answer 4

This is an example of chunking, just like phone numbers, credit card numbers, etc.

Here is a good Wikipedia article about it.

Answer 5

Just about every visual represenation of a guid that I've seen uses the dashed format. It's much easier on the eyes.

Answer 6

The hyphens are used to separate each number

E93416C5-9377-4A1D-8390-7E57D439C9E7

Hex digits  Description
8           Data1
4           Data2
4           Data3
4           Initial two bytes from Data4
12          Remaining six bytes from Data4