Faker: Fake Text with Character Count

[russellschmidt]

Anyone ever dreamed of a lorem ipsum generator or somesuch that could be passed a character maximum count? Something like Hipster.paragraph_by_characters(256).

Use cases:

• testing length validations
• avoiding inadvertently hitting length validations on other tests
• catch formatting and layout issues with very long entries if seeding with Faker data

[keithbro]

I think this is a good idea. Happy to do this one if people are keen.

[jguthrie100]

Hi guys, sorry to jump in @keithbro , but I thought I'd have a shot at working this (newbie to opensource, and could do with the experience on a straight forward fix!)

[stympy]

Is the desire to have exactly N characters returned, or at least N characters returned?

[russellschmidt]

The goal, in my mind, is to test around validations, so we might want an exact character count returned to make sure we can hit the max character validation / go over that limit on each test.

[russellschmidt]

(I’ve been using the Number library and just returning giant integers as a workaround that is functionally perfect but aesthetically meh)

[stympy]

I'm thinking it might make more sense to implement this as an optional argument to the paragraph methods rather than creating a new paragraph_by_chars method. It would also be nice to switch to named arguments for that approach. I've been wanting to do that for all of Faker.

[jguthrie100]

I was originally going to go down the line of adding it to the existing paragraphs method (makes much more sense in my opinion than making a whole new method), but had the same thought of where to set the param. It gets a bit long winded once you've had to account for number of sentences, whether to include supplemental words etc, so essentially I'd agree that named params are the way to go.

[vbrazo]

We've reviewed the PR and merged it.