Pinery is intended for generation of structurally complex test data on the basis of grammar-like descriptions (such as BNF, regular expressions, DTD, etc.). This service allows generating tests from Perl regular expressions.

The following constructs of Perl regular expressions are supported in Pinery:

.	Any character
|	Alternation
[...]	Character class
[^...]	Inverted character class
\t	Tab
\w	A "word" character: [a-zA-Z_] (without digits!)
\W	A non-word character: [^a-zA-Z0-9_] (also without digits!)
\s	A whitespace character: [ \t]
\S	All but \s
\d	A digit character: [0-9]
\D	A non-digit character
?	Optional element (i.e. 1 or 0 times)
*	List of length >= 0 (i.e. 0 or more times)
+	List of length >= 1 (i.e. 1 or more times)
{size}	List of length = size (i.e. exactly size times)
{min,}	List of length >= min (i.e. at least min times)
{min,max}	List of length >= min and <= max (i.e. at least min but not more than max times)
\	Quote the next metacharacter (such as '[', '(', '\' etc.)

Markers for the beginning of the line and for the end of the line (^ and $) are ignored.

Note that the Pinery generator treats all quantifiers (but {size}) as minimal (i.e. "non-greedy"). Thus, for the regular expression 'a*.' the line 'aaa' may be generated. In order to obtain correct line in this example, the regular expression should be modified as follows: 'a*[^a]'.