Metadata-Version: 1.1
Name: StringGenerator
Version: 0.1.3
Summary: Generate randomized strings of characters using a template
Home-page: https://github.com/paul-wolf/strgen
Author: Paul Wolf
Author-email: paul.wolf@yewleaf.com
License: BSD
Description: strgen
        ======
        
        Generate randomized strings of characters using a template.
        
        This Python module enables a user to generate test data, unique ids,
        passwords, vouchers or other randomized data very quickly using a
        template language. The template language is superficially similar to
        regular expressions but instead of defining how to match or capture
        strings, it defines how to generate randomized strings.
        
        An example template for generating a strong password:
        
        ::
        
             [\w\p\d]{20}
        
        will generate something like the following:
        
        ::
        
             P{:45Ec5$3)2!I68x`{6
        
        Usage:
        
        ::
        
            from strgen import StringGenerator
            StringGenerator(<template>).render()
        
        or to produce a list of unique strings:
        
        ::
        
            from strgen import StringGenerator
            StringGenerator(<template>).render_list(10,unique=True)
        
        Example:
        
        ::
        
            >>> from strgen import StringGenerator
            >>> StringGenerator('[\l\d]{4:18}&[\d]&[\p]').render()
            u'Cde90uC{X6lWbOueT'
        
        The ``template`` is a string that is a sequence of one or more of the
        following:
        
        -  *Literal text* (for example: ``UID``)
        -  *Character class* (for example: ``[a-z\s]``)
        -  *Group*, a combination of literals and character classes, possibly
           separated by operators and using parenthesis where appropriate (for
           example: ``(UID[\d]{4}&[\w]{4})``)
        
        In more detail:
        
        Literal: <any string>
        ---------------------
        
        Any literal string.
        
        Example:
        
        ::
        
            orderno
        
        Special characters need to be escaped with backslash ``\``.
        
        Character class: [<class specification>]
        ----------------------------------------
        
        Much like in regular expressions, it uses strings of characters and
        hyphen for defining a class of characters.
        
        Example:
        
        ::
        
            [a-zA-Z0-9_]
        
        The generator will randomly choose characters from the set of lower case
        letters, digits and the underscore. The number of characters generated
        will be exactly one in this case. For more, use a quantifier:
        
        ::
        
            [a-zA-Z0-9_]{8}
        
        As a shortcut for commonly used character sets, a character set code may
        be used. The following will render in exactly the same way:
        
        ::
        
            [\w]{8}
        
        Character Set Codes
        -------------------
        
        -  ``\W``: whitespace + punctuation
        -  ``\a``: ascii\_letters
        -  ``\c``: lowercase
        -  ``\d``: digits
        -  ``\h``: hexdigits
        -  ``\l``: letters
        -  ``\o``: octdigits
        -  ``\p``: punctuation
        -  ``\r``: printable
        -  ``\s``: whitespace
        -  ``\u``: uppercase
        -  ``\w``: ``_`` + letters + digits
        
        Quantifier: {x:y}
        -----------------
        
        Where x is lower bound and y is upper bound. This construct must always
        follow immediately a class with no intervening whitespace. It is
        possible to write {:y} as a shorthand for {0:y} or {y} to indicate a
        fixed length.
        
        Example:
        
        ::
        
            [a-z]{0:8}
        
        Generates a string from zero to 8 in length composed of lower case
        alphabetic characters.
        
        ::
        
            [a-z]{4}|[0-9]{4}
        
        Generates a string with either four lower case alphabetic characters or
        a string of digits that is four in length.
        
        Using a character class and no quantifier will result in a quantifier of
        1. Thus:
        
        ::
        
              [abc]
        
        will result always in either ``a``, ``b``, or ``c``.
        
        Group: (<group specification>)
        ------------------------------
        
        A group specification is a collection of literals, character classes or
        other groups divided by the OR operator ``|`` or the shuffle operator
        ``&``.
        
        OR Operator
        -----------
        
        The binary ``|`` operator can be used in a group to cause one of the
        operands to be returned and the other to be ignored with an even chance.
        
        Shuffle Operator
        ----------------
        
        The binary ``&`` operator causes its operands to be combined and
        shuffled. This addresses the use case for many password requirements,
        such as, "at least 6 characters where 2 or more are digits". For
        instance:
        
        ::
        
            [\l]{6:10}&[\d]{2}
        
        If a literal or a group is an operand of the shuffle operator, it will
        have its character sequence shuffled with the other operand.
        
        ::
        
            foo&bar
        
        will produce strings like:
        
        ::
        
            orbfao
        
        Concatenation and Operators
        ---------------------------
        
        Classes, literals and groups in sequence are concatenated in the order
        they occur. Use of the ``|`` or ``&`` operators always binds the
        operands immediately to the left and right:
        
        ::
        
            [\d]{8}xxx&yyy
        
        produces something like:
        
        ::
        
             00488926xyyxxy
        
        In otherwords, the digits occur first in sequence as expected. This is
        equivalent to this:
        
        ::
        
            [\d]{8}(xxx&yyy)
        
        Special Characters, Escaping and Errors
        ---------------------------------------
        
        There are fewer special characters than regular expressions:
        
        ::
        
            [](){}|&-$
        
        They can be used as literals by escaping with backslash. All other
        characters are treated as literals. The hyphen is only special in a
        character class, when it appears within square brackets. The template
        parser tries to raise exceptions when syntax errors are made, but not
        every error will be caught, like having space between a class and
        quantifier.
        
        Spaces
        ------
        
        Do not use any spaces in the template unless you intend to use them as
        characters in the output:
        
        ::
        
            >>> SG('(zzz & yyy)').render()
            u'zzyz y y'
        
        Character Classes and Quantifiers
        ---------------------------------
        
        Use a colon in the curly braces to indicate a range. There are sensible
        defaults:
        
        ::
        
            [\w]       # randomly choose a single word character
            [\w]{0:8}  # generate word characters from 0-8 in length 
            [\w]{:8}   # a synonym for the above
            [\w]{8}    # generate word characters of exactly 8 in length
            [a-z0-9]   # generate a-z and digits, just one as there is no quantifier
            [a-z0-9_!@]  # you can combine ranges with individual characters
        
        Here's an example of generating a syntactically valid but, hopefully,
        spurious email address:
        
        ::
        
            [\c]{10}(.|_)[\c]{5:10}@[\c]{3:12}.(com|net|org)
        
        The first name will be exactly 10 lower case characters; the last name
        will be 5-10 characters of lower case letters, each separated by either
        a dot or underscore. The domain name without domain class will be 3 - 12
        lower case characters and the domain type will be one of
        '.com','.net','.org'.
        
        The following will produce strings that tend to have more letters,
        because the set of letters (52) is larger than the set of digits (10):
        
        ::
        
            [\l\d]
        
        Using multiple character set codes repeatedly will increase the
        probability of a character from that set occuring in the result string:
        
        ::
        
            [\l\d\d\d\d]
        
        This will provide a string that is three times more likely to contain a
        digit than the previous example:
        
        ::
        
            [\l\d]
        
        Uniqueness
        ----------
        
        When using the ``unique=True`` flag, it's possible the generator cannot
        possibly produce the required number of unique strings. For instance:
        
        ::
        
             StringGenerator("[0-1]").render_list(100,unique=True)
        
        This will generate an exception but not before attempting to generate
        the strings.
        
        The number of times the generator needs to render new strings to satisfy
        the list length and uniqueness is not determined at parse time. The
        maximum number of times it will try is by default n x 10 where n is the
        requested length of the list. Therefore, taking the above example, the
        generator will attempt to generate the unique list of 0's and 1's 100 x
        10 = 1000 times before giving up.
        
        Unicode
        -------
        
        Unicode is supported for both the template and output.
        
        Character Sets
        --------------
        
        Character sets used for backslashed character codes are exactly the
        Python character sets from the string package. While the module is
        designed to work on pre- Python 3, we use only those member variables
        from string that are present in Python 3. This avoids the
        locale-dependent sets of characters.
        
        Randomness Methods
        ------------------
        
        The generator tries to use ``random.SystemRandom()`` for ``randint``,
        ``shuffle``, etc. It falls back to ``random.randint`` and associated
        methods if it can't use ``SystemRandom``.
        
        Debugging
        ---------
        
        Call the dump() method on the class instance to get useful information:
        
        -  Version of strgen module
        -  Version of Python
        -  The class name used for random methods
        -  The parse tree
        -  The output from one invocation of the render() method
        
        The output looks something like the following:
        
        ::
        
            >>> SG('[\w]{8}&xyz|(zzz&yyy)').dump()
            StringGenerator version: 1.1.2
            Python version: 2.7.3 |EPD_free 7.3-2 (32-bit)| (default, Apr 12 2012, 11:28:34)
            [GCC 4.0.1 (Apple Inc. build 5493)]
            Random method provider class: SystemRandom
            sequence:
            OR
                 AND
                     -1:8:_abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ0123456789
                     xyz
                sequence:
                     AND
                          zzz
                          yyy
            u'zMXGPwyxE9a'
                                                                                                                            
        
        Rationale and Design Goals
        --------------------------
        
        In Python, the need to generate random strings comes up frequently and
        is accomplished usually (though not always) via something like the
        following code snippet:
        
        ::
        
              import random
              import string
              mykey = ''.join(random.choice(string.ascii_uppercase + string.digits) for x in range(10))
        
        This generates a string that is 10 characters made of uppercase letters
        and digits. Unfortunately, this solution becomes cumbersome when
        real-world requirements are added. Take for example, the typical
        requirement to generate a password: "a password shall have 6 - 20
        characters of which at least one must be a digit and at least one must
        be a special character". The above solution then becomes much more
        complicated and changing the requirements is an error-prone and
        unnecessarily complex task.
        
        The equivalent using the strgen package is the following:
        
        ::
        
            from strgen import StringGenerator as sg
            sg('[\u\d]{10}').render()
        
        strgen is far more compact, flexible and feature-rich than using the
        standard solution:
        
        -  It tries to use a better entropy mechanism and falls back gracefully
           if this is not available on the host OS.
        
        -  The user can easily modify the specification (template) with minimal
           effort without the fear of introducing hard-to-test code paths.
        
        -  Modifications to the template are simpler and far less error prone
           than writing all the code necessary to implement changes in a random
           string specification
        
        -  It covers a broader set of use cases: unique ids, persistent unique
           filenames, test data, etc.
        
        -  The template syntax is very easy to learn for anyone familiar with
           regular expressions while being much simpler.
        
        -  It supports unicode.
        
        -  It works on Python 2.6, 2.7 and 3.
        
        -  It proposes a standard way of expressing common requirements, like "a
           password shall have 6 - 20 characters of which at least one must be a
           digit and at least one must be a special character":
        
           ::
        
                [\l\d]{4:18}&[\d]&[\p]
        
        This package is designed with the following goals in mind:
        
        -  Provide an abstract template language that does not depend on a
           specific implementation language.
        
        -  Reduce dependencies on other packages.
        
        -  Keep syntax as simple as possible while being useful.
        
        -  Provide an implementation design with associated behaviour that
           strikes the right balance between ease-of-implementation and
           ease-of-use.
        
        -  Superficially similar to regular expressions to enable developers to
           quickly pick up the template syntax.
        
        -  Support non-ASCII languages (unicode).
        
        License
        -------
        
        Released under the BSD license.
        
        Original Author: paul.wolf@yewleaf.com
        
Platform: UNKNOWN
Classifier: Development Status :: 4 - Beta
Classifier: Intended Audience :: Information Technology
Classifier: License :: OSI Approved :: BSD License
Classifier: Programming Language :: Python
Classifier: Programming Language :: Python :: 2.6
Classifier: Programming Language :: Python :: 2.7
Classifier: Programming Language :: Python :: 3
