Suggestion: Replace your implementation of Faker::String.from_regexp with a dependency

[tom-lord]

I recently stumbled across this gem, and noticed that you are using a custom implementation of Faker::String.from_regexp to generate strings from a regular expression:

ffaker/lib/ffaker/string.rb

Lines 19 to 28 in 49d2226

	def from_regexp(exp)
	result = ''
	@last_token = nil
	# Drop surrounding /'s and split into characters
	tokens = exp.inspect[1...-1].split(//)
	result << process_token(tokens) until tokens.empty?
	result
	end

This implementation is OK for the basics, but is far from comprehensive! There is an open issue about one such bug, and another open issue that's apparently unresolved.

The regexp language is vast and complicated; solving this problem for all possible regular expressions is far from easy. However, this library provides a much more complete solution. For backwards compatibility, you could implement this as:

module FFaker
  module String
    def self.from_regexp(exp)
      puts 'Warning: FFaker::String.from_regexp is deprecated. Use exp.random_example'
      exp.random_example
    end
  end
end

There are a couple of potential minor issues we could discuss before dropping in this replacement (e.g. Regexp#random_example could be a refinement instead of a global class extension?), but more the most part it should be a very simple change.

[lilsweetcaligula]

Hello, just a random guy here looking to contribute.

In my opinion, improved support for FFaker::String.from_regexp could theoretically help easily resolve issues such as #353. In this case one would simply plug in a valid regex and wrap it in a method.

I am personally opposed to any sort of monkey patching in cases where it can otherwise be avoided, so if a dependency is to be introduced, I would recommend that the gem has its own namespace. Then FFaker::String.from_regexp could in theory be simply re-implemented as:

module FFaker::String
  def self.from_regexp(exp)
    RegexpToRandomString.generate(exp)
  end
end

Kind Regards