Generate part-random strings from regex

Question

I have a set of complex identifiers that are the column names of a dataframe. This regular expression matches all of them :

regex <- "^PLUTO-.{2}-.{4}-01.{1}-.{3}-.{4}-.{2}$"

Now I would like to generate random identifiers using this regex to get something like this :

"PLUTO-xx-xxxx-01x-xxx-xxxx-xx"
"PLUTO-xx-xxxx-01x-xxx-xxxx-xx"
...

Where x's are random characters.

Is there a function that does such things in R? I found such topics for java and python but nothing in R (only paste() and collapse() solutions).

akrun · Accepted Answer · 2017-06-15 15:19:31Z

1

One option is gsubfn

library(gsubfn)
gsub("\\^|\\$", "", gsubfn("\\.{([[:digit:]]+)}", ~ paste(rep("x", n), collapse=""), regex))
#[1] "PLUTO-xx-xxxx-01x-xxx-xxxx-xx"

answered Jun 15, 2017 at 15:19

akrun

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1 Comment

Paul Endymion Over a year ago

Thanks your code with rep(sample(c(LETTERS, 1:9), 1), n) did the trick! Though I was thinking about a function that would identify regex and randomly generate possible strings.

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