Recently I put together some quick code to give some timings on the various data generation libraries available for Go. For each library there were a few key pieces of data generation I wanted to time:
- First Name – basically a first name of some sort, like Adam, Nancy, or Frank.
- Full Name – something like Jason McCormick or Sally Smith.
- Address – A basic street address, or whatever the generator might provide.
- User Agent – Such as that which is sent along with the browser response.
- Color – Something like red, blue, green, or other color beyond the basics.
- Email – A fully formed, albeit faked email address.
- Phone – A phone number, ideally with area code and prefix too.
- Credit Card Number – Ideally a properly formed one, which many of the generators seem to provide based on VISA, Mastercard, or related company specifications.
- Sentence – A stand multi-word lorem ipsum based sentence would be perfect.
I went through and searched for libraries that I wanted to try out. Of all the libraries I found I narrowed it down to three specific libraries. When I add the imports for these libraries, by way of how Go works, it gives you the repo locations:
- “github.com/bxcodec/faker” – faker – Faker generates data based on a Struct, which is a pretty cool way to determine what type of data you want and to get it returned in a particularly useful format.
- “github.com/icrowley/fake” – fake – Fake is a library inspired by the ffaker and forgery Ruby gems. Not that you’d be familiar with those, but if you are you have instant insight into how this library works.
- “github.com/malisit/kolpa” – kolpa – This is another data generator that creates fake data for various types of data, structures, strings, sentences, and more.