Generating random alphanumeric strings with Faker
Curtis Blackwell β’ 2021.11.04
Quick Tips TDD LaravelJust wanted to share a quick little thing I learned you could do with Faker, a library I've been using for years in writing tests.
Fuck context, show me the coolness.
I'm writing tests for an API integration where I need to fake some IDs that, in production, would come from the API. The IDs are always 20β24-character alphanumeric strings.
At first, I thought I might need to do something like use the password
method and make sure it was long enough that I could strip out any non-alphanumeric characters. But that felt tedious and over-engineered, so I started thinking about shuffling a long alphanumeric string and truncating it.
Then I noticed the regexify
method. It's a little weird to use a searching/matching pattern as a way to generate a random string, but it was simple and intuitive enough.
$this->faker->regexify('[a-z0-9]{20,24}');