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Charsets

Charset defines an alphabet that can be used; mostly for generating structured strings. In Falbricate ecosystem, charset is basically an array of single-character strings.

Predefined charsets

There is already a set of charsets prepared for easier use:

  • numbers (from interval [0, 9])
  • lowercase ([a-z])
  • uppercase ([A-Z])
  • specials (some of the special characters, like any of these: .,-?!:_$#&@=+-;*~/\|'")
  • doubles (double characters, like parentheses, brackets and so on)
  • hexlower (hexadecimal characters in lowercases)
  • hexupper (hexadecimal characters in uppercases)
  • letters (upper- and lowercase letters)
  • alphanum (uppercases, lowercases and numbers)
  • alphanumspecs (uppercases, lowercases, numbers and special characters)

Using charsets

Predefined charsets can be used at wide range of places through the Falbricate ecosystem, however the most common use-case is definitely when generating strings.

To demonstrate the usage, let's use the String of length Value Generator.

Examples

Here you can compare using predefined charsets with explicit declaration

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const schema: SchemaInput = {
    fields: {
        value: {
            type: 'string-of-length',
            config: {
                length: 13,

                // Normally, to define the lowercase hexadecimal characters,
                // you would need to define the whole array of them
                charset: [
                    '0', '1', '2', '3', '4', '5', '6', '7', '8', '9', 
                    'a', 'b', 'c', 'd', 'e', 'f'
                ]
            }
        }
    }
}

const fabricator = new Fabricator(schema);

console.log(fabricator.generate());

Output

{ value: 'd25a5e750566b' }

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const schema: SchemaInput = {
    fields: {
        value: {
            type: 'string-of-length',
            config: {
                length: 13,

                // Now, you only need to specify the charset name
                charset: 'hexlower'
            }
        }
    }
}

const fabricator = new Fabricator(schema);

console.log(fabricator.generate());

Output

{ value: 'd25a5e750566b' }

Custom charsets

If your application requires a specific set of characters, you are free to define your own that meets the requirements.

Example

To define such charset, you only need to register it into the Falbricate ecosystem with following snippet:

registerCharset('my-custom-characters', ['x', 'y', 'z', '3']);

Now, let's see the whole example:

Example

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// Registration of my custom charset
registerCharset('my-custom-characters', ['x', 'y', 'z', '3']);

// Definition of schema using such charset
const schema: SchemaInput = {
    fields: {
        mySpecialString: {
            type: 'string-of-length',
            config: {
                length: 5,

                // Now, define using your charset 
                charset: 'my-custom-characters'
            }
        }
    }
}

const fabricator = new Fabricator(schema);

console.log(fabricator.generate());

Output

{ mySpecialString: 'y3zzx' }

Note

There are some requirements your custom charset must meet:

  • Unique naming convention - name you specify must be unique through the whole ecosystem

  • Given charset must be a charset - the charset (as specified above) is considered to be an array of single-character strings; nothing else is allowed.