ilario-pierbattista / reverse-regex

0.8.0 2026-10-11 20:07 UTC

Requires

• php: ^8.1
• doctrine/collections: ^1.6.5 || ^2 || ^3
• doctrine/lexer: ^1.2.1 || ^2 || ^3
• symfony/polyfill-mbstring: ^1.20.0

Requires (Dev)

• facile-it/facile-coding-standard: 1.5.0
• friendsofphp/php-cs-fixer: 3.95.27
• phpstan/phpstan: ^2.3
• phpunit/phpunit: ^10.5

Conflicts

• icomefromthenet/reverse-regex: *

MIT

• Lewis Dyer

• generator
• testing
• regex
• test data

Published on Packagist.org on 2026-10-11 20:14 UTC

README

This is a fork of https://github.com/icomefromthenet/ReverseRegex (that provides icomefromthenet/reverse-regex).

Use regular expressions to generate text strings. It can be used in the following situations:

1. Writing test data for web forms.
2. Writing test data for databases.
3. Generating test data for regular expressions.

Example

use ReverseRegex\Lexer;
use ReverseRegex\Random\SimpleRandom;
use ReverseRegex\Parser;
use ReverseRegex\Generator\Scope;

# load composer
require "vendor/autoload.php";

$lexer = new  Lexer('[a-z]{10}');
$gen   = new SimpleRandom(10007);
$result = '';

$parser = new Parser($lexer,new Scope(),new Scope());
$parser->parse()->getResult()->generate($result,$gen);

echo $result;

Produces

jmceohykoa
aclohnotga
jqegzuklcv
ixdbpbgpkl
kcyrxqqfyw
jcxsjrtrqb
kvaczmawlz
itwrowxfxh
auinmymonl
dujyzuhoag
vaygybwkfm

Other examples

1. Australian phone numbers
2. Australian postcodes
3. Mobile numbers

Installing

To install use composer

composer require ilario-pierbattista/reverse-regex

Writing a Regex

1. Escape all meta-characters i.e. if you need to escape the character in a regex you will need to escape here.
2. Not all meta-characters are supported, see the list below. Negated character classes ([^a-z]), \p and \P are rejected with an exception.
3. Use \X{####} to specify unicode value use [\X{####}-\X{####}] to specify range.
4. Unicode properties (\p, \P) are not supported, because there is no PHP port of the UCD.
5. Quantifiers are applied to left most group, literal or character class.
6. The + and * quantifiers repeat at most 100 times by default; change it with $parser->setUnboundedMax($n).

Regex Support

Example	Description	Resulting String
(abcf)	Support literals this would generate string	`abcf`
\((abcf)\)	Escape meta characters as you normally would in a regex	`(abcf)`
[a-z]	Character Classes are supported	`a`
a{5}	Quantifiers supported always last group or literal or character class	`aaaaa`
a{1,5}	Range Quantifiers supported	`aa`
a|b|c	Alternation supported pick one of three at random	`b`
a|(y|d){5}	Groups supported with alternation and quantifiers	`ddddd` or `a` or `yyyyy`
\d	Digit shorthand equ [0-9]	`1`
\w	word character shorthand equ [a-zA-Z0-9_]	`j`
\W	Non word character shorthand equ [^a-zA-Z0-9_]	`j`
\s	White space shorthand ASCII only	` `
\S	Non White space shorthand ASCII only	`i`
.	Dot all ASCII characters	`$`
* + ?	Short hand quantifiers, not recommended
\X{00FF}[\X{00FF}-\X{00FF}]	Unicode ranges
\xFF[\xFF-\xFF]	Hex ranges