Blackbox Challenge 5

Description

The purpose of this challenge is to manually manipulate character arrays. This challenge creates GUIDs.

What is a GUID?

Here is the wiki article. You’ve probably seen these long, random-looking strings:

{13840352-0cbd-480e-a269-1a5ccf72520c}

{E84BEED6-28CA-407D-98F3-D861536C5A74}

CD46570A-6478-45A8-A2C6-6E93946BCFC6

527A46688EE245669D17478145477D6F

Without getting into the actual technical details of what these strings represent (or that this string really represents a very large number), a visual inspection of a GUID will show that it:

  • is comprised of 32 alpha-numeric characters. The only letters used are A-F.
  • can have curly braces wrapping it
  • can be all upper-case, or all lower-case, but not mixed
  • can have hyphen separators or not. If it does have hyphen separators, then they are grouped as such: 8-4-4-4-12
    • 12345678-1234-1234-1234-123456789012

Requirements

  1. There are several methods of creating pure, random GUIDs. In this exercise, we will not use any of those “complicated” methods. Instead, we will simply generate a string, randomly selecting the allowed characters.
  2. You can use this function to randomly select a single allowed character 
    char get_guid_char(bool upper)
{
  char result;
  string allowed = "ABCDEF0123456789";
  int index = rand() % allowed.length();
  result = upper ? allowed[index] : tolower(allowed[index]);
  
  return result;
}
  3. Additionally, we will be saving the generated GUIDS in a file. You can display them on the screen as well, if you choose, but the final output must be in a text file

Partial main()

If you used the suggested function in step 2 above, then you will need to have the following in your .cpp file.

#include <iostream>
#include <cstdlib>
#include <ctime>

int main()
{
  srand(time(NULL));  


  return 0;
}

Sample Interaction / Output

Lower case or upper case: u
Dashes or no dashes: n
How many GUIDs to create? 10 

Done. See GUID.txt

$ cat GUID.txt
EA25D82041974B9089459223D74E84DA
4DA4166F33584DEB94633AB2AFBF7E47
AA2D938B07994D3883DF1BDDFBFEF95C
21BCFF0340BD4E41986C9FF942D60709
CFE66E1E5E6544309F71AAB8147ADFF4
759C08B84A7748978A4D1FFDA0ECC1A0
D9080C7D8A384F1BBE51B2262BB94D03
9826A697DF424D7E96E20111D32C76C1
41B58FA9961A41829F25EE9CA5C5DA62
DA8955E2B7CD4EB9AD888EFD45512B4F

Sample Interaction / Output

Lower case or upper case: l
Dashes or no dashes: d
How many GUIDs to create? 5

Done. See GUID.txt

$ cat GUID.txt
066cdd0c-d1a9-4e7e-9e33-b111a8ffe5dd
67348423-c471-4f60-ada4-bdef9815a71d
0be69568-0a3b-445b-a5dd-7d880ae60415
3db7041d-254c-4af7-a01a-309f91271f60
159c35a9-a3f8-41ac-82b3-1415090ad6cc

Sample Interaction / Output

Lower case or upper case: u
Dashes or no dashes: d
How many GUIDs to create? 3 

Done. See GUID.txt

$ cat GUID.txt
43C72593-EE0C-4C99-8658-83A9436376DF
9E3B28EB-9CC1-4C81-9796-D8AC617854B3
C0EA0387-5372-4DB7-9972-352CA7BD0FFF

 

LEGEND
PROGRAM OUTPUT
USER INPUT
FROM INPUT

CATALOG ID: CPP-BB0005

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