How to validate GUID is a GUID

Question

How to determine if a string contains a GUID vs just a string of numbers.

will a GUID always contain at least 1 alpha character?

Answer 1

There is no guarantee that a GUID contains alpha characters. FFFFFFFF-FFFF-FFFF-FFFF-FFFFFFFFFFFF is a valid GUID so is 00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000 and anything in between.

If you are using .NET 4.0, you can use the answer above for the Guid.Parse and Guid.TryParse. Otherwise, you can do something like this:

public static bool TryParseGuid(string guidString, out Guid guid)
{
    if (guidString == null) throw new ArgumentNullException("guidString");
    try
    {
        guid = new Guid(guidString);
        return true;
    }
    catch (FormatException)
    {
        guid = default(Guid);
        return false;
    }
}