Need well formatted data for testing

Question

Sometimes you need data for tests, like Adobe Thermo has prewritten "sets" of data, like 1-word strings, 3-word strings, etc for use in populating data controls.

I need:

Continuous text, no newlines
CSV Numbers, Integers
CSV Numbers, Decimals
URL encoded strings

Any ideas on how to get any of those?

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Sep 01 '09 at 17:45

GenerateData.com is a free, open source script written in JavaScript, PHP and MySQL that lets you quickly generate large volumes of custom data in a variety of formats for use in testing software, populating databases.

JS-enabled and browser-friendly.
Many data types: names, phone numbers, email addresses, cities, states, provinces, counties, dates, street addresses, number ranges, alphanumeric strings, lorem ipsum text and more.
Option to generate data in XML, Excel, HTML, CSV or SQL.
Country specific data (state / province / county) for Canada, US, Netherlands and UK.
Saves your data generation forms for later use

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered May 29 '13 at 03:32

1

Try www.mockaroo.com.

This is a free tool that let's you generate up to 100,000 rows of realistic test data in CSV, tab-delimited, and SQL formats. You can generate just about any data type: strings, numbers, emails, domains, urls, addresses, names, unicode, custom values based on a formula you provide and a lot more. You can also save your schemas for reuse.

answered May 29 '13 at 03:32

Sasha Brocato

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FYI, If you're looking specifically for a set of URLs to test with -- as I was -- the Mockaroo site is better. Unlike GenerateData.com, it has a specific 'url' data type. You can even customize the URL features to generate. – EdwinW Oct 11 '13 at 21:14

score 1 · Answer 3 · answered Feb 22 '09 at 13:26

1

Generate them? A quick perl script can generate huge sets of data.

Part of the challenge with CSV is all the edge cases (awkward standard-use of newlines, which does not exactly match how Excel or SQL Server parse CSVs). I've had to build those by hand in the past.

answered Feb 22 '09 at 13:26

user54650

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Yup..it's a programming language, like any other. – user54650 Feb 22 '09 at 16:39

score 1 · Answer 4 · answered Feb 22 '09 at 13:26

Continuous text, no newlines

Download a few files from Project Gutenberg and run sed on it to replace newlines by whitespace.

CSV Numbers, Integers

Google/Y! finance AFAIK allows you to download historical stock quotes. That'd be a nice start. But they are usually a mixture of string(stock name), date and 4 different floating values and one integral volume value.

score 1 · Answer 5 · answered Feb 22 '09 at 14:07

I simply made (in VB.NET) a helper class to generate random strings of a length in a specified range, or random numbers. I did this when first trying unit testing within Visual Studio. So, for example, when I wanted to test Customer.Create, I would set up a loop to run 1000 times to create 1000 customers with all kinds of random values. For example,

(pseudo-real-code)

For x = 1 to 1000
    Dim c as New Customer
    c.Name = Helpers.GetRandomString([minLenth], [maxLength])
    c.Address1 = Helpers.GetRandomString([minLenth], [maxLength])
    c.Telephone = Helpers.GetRandomPhoneNumber()
    ...
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Need well formatted data for testing

5 Answers5