I am trying to generate random numbers (integers) in Go, to no avail. I found the rand
package in crypto/rand
, which seems to be what I want, but I can't tell from the documentation how to use it. This is what I'm trying right now:
b := []byte{}
something, err := rand.Read(b)
fmt.Printf("something = %v\n", something)
fmt.Printf("err = %v\n", err)
But unfortunately this always outputs:
something = 0
err = <nil>
Is there a way to fix this so that it actually generates random numbers? Alternatively, is there a way to set the upper bound on the random numbers this generates?
crypto/rand
provides only binary stream of random data, but you can read integers from it using encoding/binary
:
package main
import "encoding/binary"
import "crypto/rand"
func main() {
var n int32
binary.Read(rand.Reader, binary.LittleEndian, &n)
println(n)
}
Depending on your use case, another option is the math/rand
package. Don't do this if you're generating numbers that need to be completely unpredictable. It can be helpful if you need to get results that are reproducible, though -- just pass in the same seed you passed in the first time.
Here's the classic "seed the generator with the current time and generate a number" program:
package main
import (
"fmt"
"math/rand"
"time"
)
func main() {
rand.Seed(time.Now().Unix())
fmt.Println(rand.Int())
}
As of 1 april 2012, after the release of the stable version of the lang, you can do the following:
package main
import "fmt"
import "time"
import "math/rand"
func main() {
rand.Seed(time.Now().UnixNano()) // takes the current time in nanoseconds as the seed
fmt.Println(rand.Intn(100)) // this gives you an int up to but not including 100
}