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Seed a Ruby `Random` object with a seed value that is derived from a given string
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 Dependencies

Development

~> 1.17
~> 10.0
~> 3.0
 Project Readme

StringDerivedRandom

Allows one to seed a Ruby Random object with a seed value that is derived from a given string. This can be useful for doing "one-in-N" selection for large corpi of identifiers. For example:

rng = StringDerivedRandom.new(document.id.to_s)
rng.rand # => the result is always going to be the same

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'string_derived_random'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install string_derived_random

Usage

In your code, use a string identifier (for example a filesystem path, or a user ID) to create a generator, and then use the generator to emit random values. The generator is a Ruby Random object.

if StringDerivedRandom.new(file_path).rand(1..200) == 1
  apply_processing # will apply to one in 200 file paths
end

Development

After checking out the repo, run bin/setup to install dependencies. Then, run rake spec to run the tests. You can also run bin/console for an interactive prompt that will allow you to experiment.

To install this gem onto your local machine, run bundle exec rake install. To release a new version, update the version number in version.rb, and then run bundle exec rake release, which will create a git tag for the version, push git commits and tags, and push the .gem file to rubygems.org.

Contributing

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/julik/string_derived_random.

License

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.