Ranges & Placeholders

In addition to static characters, Mapchar enables dynamically injecting external sources and numerical ranges into expressions.

Numeric Ranges

Rather than using [1|2|3|...|100], you can use the built-in numeric range syntax #[start-end:step]. These ranges can be placed anywhere inside an expression.

  • Ascending: #[1-5] yields 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

  • Descending: #[5-1] yields 5, 4, 3, 2, 1

  • With Steps: #[2-10:2] yields 2, 4, 6, 8, 10

Examples:

$ mapchar 'user#[1-10]'
user1
user2
...
user10

File Placeholders

You can inject contents from external wordlists directly into a Mapchar generation using the caret placeholder ^. Each caret consumes one sequential file argument passed to the CLI.

$ mapchar '^-^' firstnames.txt lastnames.txt
Bob-Smith
Bob-Doe
Ana-Smith
Ana-Doe

File and Range Quantifiers Remember that placeholders and ranges are native tokens! You can apply Quantifiers to them directly to repeat configurations.

$ mapchar '^{2}' colors.txt
RedRed
RedBlue
...

$ mapchar '#[1-3]{3}'
111
112
...

Mapchar calculates permutations gracefully, properly nesting iterations. Since files are parsed as native tokens, memory usage is kept extremely low, reading the file securely without caching the entire permutations tree in RAM.

Inline Macros

Don’t want to create an external file just for a small set of words? You can supply inline payload arrays by prefixing arguments with //. This treats the argument itself as a pattern replacement for ^.

$ mapchar 'login-^-^' '//[user|admin]' '//[1|2]'
login-user-1
login-user-2
login-admin-1
login-admin-2