Generating a genuine looking National Insurance Number(NINO)

• 
  Hi,
  
  Data Generator does some custom parsing of regular expressions, so it expects a non-special character to follow "?". That means it can't process negative lookahead ("?!"). I'm looking into workarounds but I suspect the workaround would be to implement the regex in the Python generator or by writing a custom generator for your use case.

  Brian Donahue January 03, 2014 10:31

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• 
  I think this can be worked around in SQL Data Generator 3 with the Python script generator. Provided you install Python 2.7 and the exrex library, you should be able to generate random strings matching a regular expression:

  # Basic generator template
  
  def main(config):
      import exrex
      # config["column_name"] is the column name
      # config["column_type"] is the column datatype
      # config["column_size"] is the column size
      # config["n_rows"] is the number of rows
      # config["seed"] is the current random seed
      RegExText="^(?!BG|GB|NK|KN|TN|NT|ZZ)[ABCEGHJ-PRSTW-Z][ABCEGHJ-NPRSTW-Z]\d{6}[A-D]$"
      return exrex.getone(RegExTest)
  

  At this point I am having difficulty getting exrex running - seems to be a dependency on sre_parse - maybe an expert in Python knows how to make it work.

  Brian Donahue January 17, 2014 06:53

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• 
  I got it working in SQL Data Generator 3!
  First, install Python 2.7 x86 from http://www.python.org/download/
  Then get setuptools for Python 2.7 https://pypi.python.org/pypi/setuptools
  Then download setup.py from https://github.com/asciimoo/exrex
  Install exrex from the command-line using python setup.py install
  In your Python root folder (c:\python27) locate the lib subfolder
  Edit exrex.py and locate the line
  from re import sre_parse, U
  Before this add the line import sre_parse and change the line to read from re import U
  
  Reason this did not work for me, I suppose exrex was written for a different version of python before they moved sre_parse to its' own module.
  
  Now you can use this code

  # Basic generator template
  
  def main(config):
      import exrex
      # config["column_name"] is the column name
      # config["column_type"] is the column datatype
      # config["column_size"] is the column size
      # config["n_rows"] is the number of rows
      # config["seed"] is the current random seed
      return exrex.getone('^(?!BG|GB|NK|KN|TN|NT|ZZ)[ABCEGHJ-PRSTW-Z][ABCEGHJ-NPRSTW-Z]\d{6}[A-D]$')
  

  Brian Donahue January 20, 2014 05:00

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• 
  Hi Brian
  You are an absolute star

  conrad towner January 22, 2014 05:24

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• 
  Hi,
  
  Please note that this fails when using certain versions of Python.
  It works correctly when using 2.7.6 x86.
  
  Thank you,

  Sergio R July 30, 2015 08:24

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• 
  Can I use Python 3.10.10 for this task?

  Leon_1 April 26, 2023 08:04

  - 0 +

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