Generate vehicle registration number in SG context

[clement7903]

Clear and concise description of the problem

As a developer using faker i want to generate vehicle registration number (Vehicle Registration Mark - VRM) in Singapore's context so that there is a more accurate and realistic local representation for Singapore's vehicle registration number

• In particular, it should adhere to the car prefixes stated here https://www.lta.gov.sg/content/dam/ltagov/who_we_are/statistics_and_publications/statistics/pdf/M031-Car_Prefix.pdf
• It should also satisfy the last alphabet checksum algorithm here
  https://sgwiki.com/wiki/Vehicle_Checksum_Formula

Suggested solution

• Add new locale en_SG
• Add new vrm() function which returns the appropriate vehicle registration number (Vehicle Registration Mark - VRM)

Alternative

No response

Additional context

No response

[github-actions]

Thank you for your feature proposal.

We marked it as "waiting for user interest" for now to gather some feedback from our community:

• If you would like to see this feature be implemented, please react to the description with an up-vote (:+1:).
• If you have a suggestion or want to point out some special cases that need to be considered, please leave a comment, so we are aware about them.

We would also like to hear about other community members' use cases for the feature to give us a better understanding of their potential implicit or explicit requirements.

We will start the implementation based on:

• the number of votes (:+1:) and comments
• the relevance for the ecosystem
• availability of alternatives and workarounds
• and the complexity of the requested feature

We do this because:

• There are plenty of languages/countries out there and we would like to ensure that every method can cover all or almost all of them.
• Every feature we add to faker has "costs" associated to it:
  • initial costs: design, implementation, reviews, documentation
  • running costs: awareness of the feature itself, more complex module structure, increased bundle size, more work during refactors

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View more issues which are waiting for user interest

[matthewmayer]

Ruby has https://www.rubydoc.info/gems/faker/Faker%2FVehicle.license_plate for comparison

• here is their checksum code https://github.com/faker-ruby/faker/blob/3b56a737e4c8ad207305c25f92a43fd3ce5ac941/lib/faker/default/vehicle.rb#L320

[matthewmayer]

• I think en_SG locale is a good idea
• i think a faker.vehicle.vrm() (or licensePlate(), etc) is a good idea
• i think the only issue will be with the checksum - we don't have a generic way to do a checksum calculation within a string provided by faker.helpers.fake, and i think there might be some resistance to adding additional custom code for a method if its only used in a single locale (versus say the Luhn checksum code used for faker.finance.creditCardNumber() which is used in all locales)

[ST-DDT]

• i think the only issue will be with the checksum - we don't have a generic way to do a checksum calculation within a string provided by faker.helpers.fake, and i think there might be some resistance to adding additional custom code for a method if its only used in a single locale (versus say the Luhn checksum code used for faker.finance.creditCardNumber() which is used in all locales)

This could be solved via:

• Proposal: Replace internal fake patterns with a resolver function #3176