S3 class "UUID"
represents vector of UUIDs in native form
(128-bit). They are typically obtained by calling
UUIDgenerate
, UUIDparse
or as.UUID
.
Methods exist for common operations such as as.character
,
print
, c
, subsetting and comparison
operators. Note that arithmetic and other operations are not allowed.
UUIDs have three possible representations: as character vectors (in
the hyphenated 8-4-4-4-12 hexadecimal form), the UUID
class
described here and raw vectors. In the latter case the raw vector must
be of length 16 or it must be a matrix with 16 rows. Since matrices in
R are stored in colum-major format, UUID must be contiguous and thus
form the columns of the raw matrix, which may be slightly
counter-intuitive, but is far morecefficient.
as.character
method exists for UUID objects and converts it to a
character vector of lower-case UUID string representation.
as.raw
method converts UUIDs to raw vectors or matrices as
describe above. Similarly, a as.UUID
method for raw vectors
performs the inverse transformation.