In ropensci/charlatan: Make Fake Data

charlatan

knitr::opts_chunk$set(
  comment = "#>",
  collapse = TRUE,
  warning = FALSE,
  message = FALSE
)

charlatan makes fake data, inspired from and borrowing some code from Python's faker (https://github.com/joke2k/faker)

Make fake data for:

• person names
• jobs
• phone numbers
• colors: names, hex, rgb
• credit cards
• DOIs
• numbers in range and from distributions
• gene sequences
• geographic coordinates
• emails
• URIs, URLs, and their parts
• IP addresses
• more coming ...

Possible use cases for charlatan:

• Students in a classroom setting learning any task that needs a dataset.
• People doing simulations/modeling that need some fake data
• Generate fake dataset of users for a database before actual users exist
• Complete missing spots in a dataset
• Generate fake data to replace sensitive real data with before public release
• Create a random set of colors for visualization
• Generate random coordinates for a map
• Get a set of randomly generated DOIs (Digital Object Identifiers) to assign to fake scholarly artifacts
• Generate fake taxonomic names for a biological dataset
• Get a set of fake sequences to use to test code/software that uses sequence data

Reasons to use charlatan:

• Light weight, few dependencies
• Relatively comprehensive types of data, and more being added
• Comprehensive set of languages supported, more being added
• Useful R features such as creating entire fake data.frame's

Installation

cran version

install.packages("charlatan")

dev version

remotes::install_github("ropensci/charlatan")

library("charlatan")
set.seed(12345)

high level function

... for all fake data operations

x <- fraudster()
x$job()
x$name()
x$color_name()

locale support

ch_job(locale = "fr_FR", n = 3)
ch_job(locale = "hr_HR", n = 3)
ch_job(locale = "uk_UA", n = 3)
ch_job(locale = "zh_TW", n = 3)

generate a dataset

ch_generate()

ch_generate("job", "phone_number", n = 30)

job

ch_job()

ch_job(10)

credit cards

ch_credit_card_provider()
ch_credit_card_provider(n = 4)

ch_credit_card_number(n = 10)

ch_credit_card_security_code()
ch_credit_card_security_code(10)

Documentation

All providers have documentation available through the help functions. All providers of the same locales, are linked together, and for every language we have a generic page, for example?`dutch-language`.

There are three vignettes, about contributing to this project, what {charlatan} does and a more in depth vignette about creating realistic data.

Usage in the wild

• eacton/R-Utility-Belt-ggplot2 (https://github.com/eacton/R-Utility-Belt-ggplot2/blob/836a6bd303fbfde4a334d351e0d1c63f71c4ec68/furry_dataset.R)

Contributors

• Roel M. Hogervorst (https://github.com/rmhogervorst)
• Scott Chamberlain (https://github.com/sckott)
• Kyle Voytovich (https://github.com/kylevoyto)
• Martin Pedersen (https://github.com/MartinMSPedersen)

If you would like to contribute, see CONTRIBUTING (on github)

similar art

• wakefield (https://github.com/trinker/wakefield)
• ids (https://github.com/richfitz/ids)
• rcorpora (https://github.com/gaborcsardi/rcorpora)
• synthpop (https://cran.r-project.org/package=synthpop)

Meta

• Please report any issues or bugs.
• License: MIT
• Get citation information for charlatan in R doing citation(package = 'charlatan')
• Please note that this package is released with a Contributor Code of Conduct. By contributing to this project, you agree to abide by its terms.

ropensci/charlatan documentation built on Feb. 6, 2025, 1:07 p.m.