Using REGEX in reverse?

[Allan]

Hi Community,

Has anyone written a 'reverse' Regular expression generator?

Normal REGEX takes a candidate textual string and checks that is conforms to some expression.

Has anyone generated test data by supplying a regular expression and returning some text that conforms to said input regular expression?

May have to return a DATASET of text as with ORs (|) there are multiple paths through the regular expression.

Weird question perhaps, well I'll just put it out there.

Yours
Allan

[rtaylor]

Allan,

No, I've never heard of any code that generates test data from RegEx.

I did write a pretty complex test data generator a while back that I could let you have a look at to see if it might meet your needs. PM me if you're interested.

HTH,

Richard

[Allan]

No, it's ok Richard. As I said it's a wacky idea, but intriguing.
If one could do it, it would make generating test data SSSSSOOOOO much easier.

Cheers

Allan

[Allan]

Richard,

Your comment:
I did write a pretty complex test data generator a while back that I could let you have a look

This is precisely the job assigned to me!
I never like re-inventing the wheel, unfortunately I've gone a fare way down my implementation route, (which also has to service as a validator of incoming test data).

I'll ping you the proposal I'm working to. (needs updating ha ha).

Cheers

Allan

[rtaylor]

Allan,

I emailed you a .mod file containing my test data generator code. I built a pretty generic system where the only requirements were to be able to generate any number records with any number of fields of any simple data type, with or without a standard distribution curve for the generated data (Gaussian, random, Pareto, etc.). An additional challenge was to make the "random" data duplicable.

HTH,

Richard