regex - Reverse regular expressions to generate data

Question

In one of the StackOverflow Podcasts (the one where guys were discussing data generation for testing DBs -- either #11 or #12), Jeff mentioned something like "reverse regular expressions", which are used exactly for that purpose: given a regex, produce a string which will eventually match said regex.

What is the correct term for this whole concept? Is this a well-known concept?

Answer 1

The Perl module String::Random (in the CPAN) does this. Takes a subset of regular expressions, and does a random walk through it.