Generating a genuine looking National Insurance Number(NINO)

conrad towner

Not sure if anyone can help me I am new to using Data Generator.
I need to generate genuine looking NINO's which can be validated using the following REGEX

^(?!BG|GB|NK|KN|TN|NT|ZZ)[ABCEGHJ-PRSTW-Z][ABCEGHJ-NPRSTW-Z]\d{6}[A-D]$

He tells me
Essentially this breaks down as follows:

• First two characters cannot be any of the following combinations: BG|GB|NK|KN|TN|NT|ZZ
• First character must be one of the following: A, B, C, E, G, H, J - P, R, S, T, W - Z
• Second character must be one of the following: A, B, C, E, G, H, J - N, P, R, S, T, W - Z
• Followed by exactly 6 digits
• Last character must be one of the following: A - D


I can create the string but don't know how to exclude certain combinations of letters for the first 2 characters of the NINO

I am using
[ABEGHJKLMNOPRSTWXYZ]{1}[ABCEGHJKLMNPRSTWXYZ]{1}\d{6}[A-D]{1}

Brian Donahue

Hi,

Data Generator does some custom parsing of regular expressions, so it expects a non-special character to follow "?". That means it can't process negative lookahead ("?!"). I'm looking into workarounds but I suspect the workaround would be to implement the regex in the Python generator or by writing a custom generator for your use case.

Brian Donahue

I think this can be worked around in SQL Data Generator 3 with the Python script generator. Provided you install Python 2.7 and the exrex library, you should be able to generate random strings matching a regular expression:

# Basic generator template

def main(config):
    import exrex
    # config["column_name"] is the column name
    # config["column_type"] is the column datatype
    # config["column_size"] is the column size
    # config["n_rows"] is the number of rows
    # config["seed"] is the current random seed
    RegExText="^(?!BG|GB|NK|KN|TN|NT|ZZ)[ABCEGHJ-PRSTW-Z][ABCEGHJ-NPRSTW-Z]\d{6}[A-D]$"
    return exrex.getone(RegExTest)

At this point I am having difficulty getting exrex running - seems to be a dependency on sre_parse - maybe an expert in Python knows how to make it work.

Brian Donahue

I got it working in SQL Data Generator 3!
First, install Python 2.7 x86 from http://www.python.org/download/
Then get setuptools for Python 2.7 https://pypi.python.org/pypi/setuptools
Then download setup.py from https://github.com/asciimoo/exrex
Install exrex from the command-line using python setup.py install
In your Python root folder (c:\python27) locate the lib subfolder
Edit exrex.py and locate the line
from re import sre_parse, U
Before this add the line import sre_parse and change the line to read from re import U

Reason this did not work for me, I suppose exrex was written for a different version of python before they moved sre_parse to its' own module.

Now you can use this code

# Basic generator template

def main(config):
    import exrex
    # config["column_name"] is the column name
    # config["column_type"] is the column datatype
    # config["column_size"] is the column size
    # config["n_rows"] is the number of rows
    # config["seed"] is the current random seed
    return exrex.getone('^(?!BG|GB|NK|KN|TN|NT|ZZ)[ABCEGHJ-PRSTW-Z][ABCEGHJ-NPRSTW-Z]\d{6}[A-D]$')

conrad towner

Hi Brian
You are an absolute star

Sergio R

Hi,

Please note that this fails when using certain versions of Python.
It works correctly when using 2.7.6 x86.

Thank you,

Leon_1

Can I use Python 3.10.10 for this task?