Reverse regular expressions to generate data

Posted by Anton Gogolev on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Anton Gogolev
Published on 2010-05-25T13:49:38Z Indexed on 2010/05/25 14:01 UTC
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regex

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algorithm

In one of the StackOverflow Podcasts (the one where guys were discussing data generation for testing DBs -- either #11 or #12), Jeff mentioned something like "reverse regular expressions", which are used exactly for that purpose: given a regex, produce a string which will eventually match said regex.

What is the correct term for this whole concept? Is this a well-known concept?

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