Skip to main content

Counting Strings

If you've done the Rapid Software Testing course, then you'll probably be familiar with the Perlclip tool, from James Bach. If not, its a useful tool for generating strings of test text. In particular I find the Perlclip Counter-string function to be pretty useful. Counterstring builds a string that indicates its own length. E.g.: "*3*5*7*10*" The last asterisk is the 10th character.

Now available as a Firefox Add-on!

I've taken the counterstring functionality and implemented it in HTML and Javascript. While this form does not do everything the original [and the best] does, It might be useful for it to be accessible anywhere via a web page. All credit for the usefulness of this goes to James Bach, all the bugs are probably my doing.

Thats right - its got bugs, like you don't have to enter a character for the 'mark' or it lets you use numbers for the 'mark'. Older versions did odd things in IE6 etc. There are no doubt many more bugs...

Display a string of length:

The character: marks the spot.



The String you requested is:

The string created has a length of:


Labels:

Comments

  1. Michael Bolton http://www.developsense.com11 January 2011 at 14:55

    There's a good reason to allow numbers for the mark: some fields prevent or reject the entry of non-alphanumeric characters before other processing happens. Some do the same with non-numeric characters. So right away, I wouldn't classify "lets you use numbers for the 'mark'" as a bug, but a feature.

    ---Michael B.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Ajay Balamurugadas11 January 2011 at 15:01

    Any bugs added on purpose? :)
    Regards,
    Ajay

    ReplyDelete
  3. Darren McMillan11 January 2011 at 19:23

    Good initiative & very helpful :-)

    I like the error message "Go try a different browser" funny :-)

    ReplyDelete
  4. John Stevenson12 January 2011 at 08:54

    Brilliant Peter.

    I hope you will add more and more to this very useful take on the tool by James.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Can Gen-AI understand Payments?

When it comes to rolling out updates to large complex banking systems, things can get messy quickly. Of course, the holy grail is to have each subsystem work well independently and to do some form of Pact or contract testing – reducing the complex and painful integration work. But nonetheless – at some point you are going to need to see if the dog and the pony can do their show together – and its generally better to do that in a way that doesn’t make millions of pounds of transactions fail – in a highly public manner, in production.  (This post is based on my recent lightning talk at  PyData London ) For the last few years, I’ve worked in the world of high value, real time and cross border payments, And one of the sticking points in bank [software] integration is message generation. A lot of time is spent dreaming up and creating those messages, then maintaining what you have just built. The world of payments runs on messages, these days they are often XML messages – and they ...
Post a Comment
Read more

What possible use could Gen AI be to me? (Part 1)

There’s a great scene in the Simpsons where the Monorail salesman comes to town and everyone (except Lisa of course) is quickly entranced by Monorail fever… He has an answer for every question and guess what? The Monorail will solve all the problems… somehow. The hype around Generative AI can seem a bit like that, and like Monorail-guy the sales-guy’s assure you Gen AI will solve all your problems - but can be pretty vague on the “how” part of the answer. So I’m going to provide a few short guides into how Generative (& other forms of AI) Artificial Intelligence can help you and your team. I’ll pitch the technical level differently for each one, and we’ll start with something fairly not technical: Custom Chatbots. ChatBots these days have evolved from the crude web sales tools of ten years ago, designed to hoover up leads for the sales team. They can now provide informative answers to questions based on documents or websites. If we take the most famous: Chat GPT 4. If we ignore the...
Post a Comment
Read more

Manumation, the worst best practice.

There is a pattern I see with many clients, often enough that I sought out a word to describe it: Manumation, A sort of well-meaning automation that usually requires frequent, extensive and expensive intervention to keep it 'working'. You have probably seen it, the build server that needs a prod and a restart 'when things get a bit busy'. Or a deployment tool that, 'gets confused' and a 'test suite' that just needs another run or three. The cause can be any number of the usual suspects - a corporate standard tool warped 5 ways to make it fit what your team needs. A one-off script 'that manager' decided was an investment and needed to be re-used... A well-intended attempt to 'automate all the things' that achieved the opposite. They result in a manually intensive - automated process, where your team is like a character in the movie Metropolis, fighting with levers all day, just to keep the lights on upstairs. Manual-automation, manu...
1 comment
Read more