Dean Wilson@UnixDaemon: Resolution for 2009 - one post a day. Yeah right.

Fri, 11 Jul 2008

Randexp - Generating test data with Ruby regexs
While paging through reddit programming recently (seems only fair since they linked to me ;)) I stumbled on to the very nifty Randexp gem, a library that uses regular expression patterns to generate data that would satisfy the pattern. Or in less tech terms - a really good test data generator.

  
# install randexp

$ irb

require "rubygems"
require "randexp"

# simple fake phone number -
/020(7|8) \d{3} \d{4}/.gen

# build a reusable class.
class Randgen
  def self.version()
   /\d{1,3}\.\d{1,4}/.gen
  end
end

# and use it.
/[:version:]/.gen

I especially like the ability to make your own character classes. I'm not a ruby guy but I can see this being very useful in lots of little data generation scripts and test harnesses.

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Posted: 2008/07/11 19:29 | /ruby | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date

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