What does close enough mean? Can they be UUIDs and GUIDs and be "close enough"? Or do they need to be *random* and non-repeating??
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What I want to test is exactly this behavior - the code which discards the duplicate and forces the string to be regenerated. To test that, I need to force the random string generator to return a duplicate at least once (but finite number of times). To create the test which would generate strings until there's at least one duplicate is unrealistic, because such a test could take a very long time to complete.
How would I write such a test?
by separating concerns.?
You have string generation.
You have duplicate rejection.
You can test duplicate rejection with a mock string generator.
You can test randomness of string generations.... aw, heck, looks like you need stats and algo gurus. Math, not a billion unit tests for the algorithm.
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-- Tim Ottinger, Sr. Consultant, Industrial Logic -------------------------------------
