Creating Random Data for Fixtures

A couple a days a go I heard a sales man raving about the capabilities of Toad (a Quest Software software) of populating tables with random data. The problem I saw with this feature is that it filled the table with incomprehensible gibberish.

Symonfy allows you to load data to your tables, but to create random data you need to rely a little on php.
Lets use a basic client table like this one (on config/doctrine/schema.yml):

Client:
  columns:
    id:
      type:          integer(4)
      primary:       true
      autoincrement: true
    firstname:
      type:    string(30)
      notnull: true
    middlename:
      type:    string(30)
      notnull: false
    lastname:
      type:    string(30)
      notnull: true
    dateOfBirth:
      type:    date
      notnull: true
    nationalId:
      type:    string(13)
      notnull: true
    gender:
      type: enum
      length: 1
      values: ['M', 'F']

To create random clients will combine PHP code inside the fixtures YaML (data/fixtures/fixtures.yml)file like this:

<?php $names = array('Juan', 'Pedro', 'Perenceo', 'Aquileo', 'Ramiro', 'Esteban',
        'John', 'Rabindranath', 'Pablo', 'Judas', 'Akira', NULL); ?>
<?php $lastnames = array('De Urriola', 'Escobedo', 'Einstein', 'Escobar','Gonzalez',
         'Luna', 'Martinez',  'Obama',  'Perez',
        'Ramirez','Hawkins', 'Marquez', 'Jaramillo',
         'Lopez', 'Vergara', NULL); ?>
Client:
<?php for ($i = 1; $i <= 10; $i++): ?>
  client_<?php echo $i ?>:
    firstname:        <?php echo $names[rand(0,count($names)-2)] ."\n" ?>
    middlename:       <?php echo $names[rand(0,count($names)-1)] ."\n"?>
    lastname:         <?php echo $lastnames[rand(0,count($lastnames)-2)] ."\n" ?>
    nationalId:       <?php echo rand(1,9) . '-'.rand(25,999).'-'.rand(1500,9859). "\n" ?>
    dateOfBirth:      <?php echo "'". rand(1956,1971).'-'.rand(1,12). '-'.rand(1,28) ."'\n" ?>
    gender:               M
<?php endfor ?>

After running doctrine:data-load the fixtures will create ten cliens records based on the $names and $lastname arrays.