This module has a number of ways of converting things into CID instances - CID.parse for strings, CID.decode for Uint8Arrays, CID.asCID for things CID-shaped.

.parse and .decode will throw, .asCID will not. We generally want to validate what we've been passed as a CID, so a common pattern seems to be forming as:

function toCID (hash) {
  if (typeof hash === 'string') {
    return CID.parse(hash)
  } else if (hash instanceof Uint8Array) {
    return CID.decode(hash)
  }

  const cid = CID.asCID(hash)
  
  if (!cid) {
    throw new Error('Invalid CID')
  }

  return cid
}

If this seems familiar it may be because this is quite similar to how the constructor from the js-cids class behaves.

It is quite useful though, any objections to making this a utility method on the CID class?