Random string generation with upper case letters a

Question

I want to generate a string of size N.

It should be made up of numbers and uppercase English letters such as:

• 6U1S75
• 4Z4UKK
• U911K4

How can I achieve this in a pythonic way?

Answer 1

I found this to be simpler and cleaner.

str_Key           = ""
str_FullKey       = "" 
str_CharacterPool = "01234ABCDEFfghij~>()"
for int_I in range(64): 
    str_Key = random.choice(str_CharacterPool) 
    str_FullKey = str_FullKey + str_Key 

Just change the 64 to vary the length, vary the CharacterPool to do alpha only alpha numeric or numeric only or strange characters or whatever you want.

Answer 2

Simply use Python's builtin uuid:

If UUIDs are okay for your purposes, use the built-in uuid package.

One Line Solution:

import uuid; uuid.uuid4().hex.upper()[0:6]

In Depth Version:

Example:

import uuid
uuid.uuid4() #uuid4 => full random uuid
# Outputs something like: UUID('0172fc9a-1dac-4414-b88d-6b9a6feb91ea')

If you need exactly your format (for example, "6U1S75"), you can do it like this:

import uuid

def my_random_string(string_length=10):
    """Returns a random string of length string_length."""
    random = str(uuid.uuid4()) # Convert UUID format to a Python string.
    random = random.upper() # Make all characters uppercase.
    random = random.replace("-","") # Remove the UUID '-'.
    return random[0:string_length] # Return the random string.

print(my_random_string(6)) # For example, D9E50C

Answer 3

This method is slightly faster, and slightly more annoying, than the random.choice() method Ignacio posted.

It takes advantage of the nature of pseudo-random algorithms, and banks on bitwise and and shift being faster than generating a new random number for each character.

# must be length 32 -- 5 bits -- the question didn't specify using the full set
# of uppercase letters ;)
_ALPHABET = 'ABCDEFGHJKLMNPQRSTUVWXYZ23456789'

def generate_with_randbits(size=32):
    def chop(x):
        while x:
            yield x & 31
            x = x >> 5
    return  ''.join(_ALPHABET[x] for x in chop(random.getrandbits(size * 5))).ljust(size, 'A')

...create a generator that takes out 5 bit numbers at a time 0..31 until none left

...join() the results of the generator on a random number with the right bits

With Timeit, for 32-character strings, the timing was:

[('generate_with_random_choice', 28.92901611328125),
 ('generate_with_randbits', 20.0293550491333)]

...but for 64 character strings, randbits loses out ;)

I would probably never use this approach in production code unless I really disliked my co-workers.

edit: updated to suit the question (uppercase and digits only), and use bitwise operators & and >> instead of % and //

Answer 4

I'd do it this way:

import random
from string import digits, ascii_uppercase

legals = digits + ascii_uppercase

def rand_string(length, char_set=legals):

    output = ''
    for _ in range(length): output += random.choice(char_set)
    return output

Or just:

def rand_string(length, char_set=legals):

    return ''.join( random.choice(char_set) for _ in range(length) )

Answer 5

Answer in one line:

''.join(random.choice(string.ascii_uppercase + string.digits) for _ in range(N))

or even shorter starting with Python 3.6 using random.choices():

''.join(random.choices(string.ascii_uppercase + string.digits, k=N))

A cryptographically more secure version; see https://stackoverflow.com/a/23728630/2213647:

''.join(random.SystemRandom().choice(string.ascii_uppercase + string.digits) for _ in range(N))

In details, with a clean function for further reuse:

>>> import string
>>> import random
>>> def id_generator(size=6, chars=string.ascii_uppercase + string.digits):
...    return ''.join(random.choice(chars) for _ in range(size))
...
>>> id_generator()
'G5G74W'
>>> id_generator(3, "6793YUIO")
'Y3U'

How does it work ?

We import string, a module that contains sequences of common ASCII characters, and random, a module that deals with random generation.

string.ascii_uppercase + string.digits just concatenates the list of characters representing uppercase ASCII chars and digits:

>>> string.ascii_uppercase
'ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ'
>>> string.digits
'0123456789'
>>> string.ascii_uppercase + string.digits
'ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ0123456789'

Then we use a list comprehension to create a list of 'n' elements:

>>> range(4) # range create a list of 'n' numbers
[0, 1, 2, 3]
>>> ['elem' for _ in range(4)] # we use range to create 4 times 'elem'
['elem', 'elem', 'elem', 'elem']

In the example above, we use [ to create the list, but we don't in the id_generator function so Python doesn't create the list in memory, but generates the elements on the fly, one by one (more about this here).

Instead of asking to create 'n' times the string elem, we will ask Python to create 'n' times a random character, picked from a sequence of characters:

>>> random.choice("abcde")
'a'
>>> random.choice("abcde")
'd'
>>> random.choice("abcde")
'b'

Therefore random.choice(chars) for _ in range(size) really is creating a sequence of size characters. Characters that are randomly picked from chars:

>>> [random.choice('abcde') for _ in range(3)]
['a', 'b', 'b']
>>> [random.choice('abcde') for _ in range(3)]
['e', 'b', 'e']
>>> [random.choice('abcde') for _ in range(3)]
['d', 'a', 'c']

Then we just join them with an empty string so the sequence becomes a string:

>>> ''.join(['a', 'b', 'b'])
'abb'
>>> [random.choice('abcde') for _ in range(3)]
['d', 'c', 'b']
>>> ''.join(random.choice('abcde') for _ in range(3))
'dac'

Answer 6

import uuid
lowercase_str = uuid.uuid4().hex  

lowercase_str is a random value like 'cea8b32e00934aaea8c005a35d85a5c0'

uppercase_str = lowercase_str.upper()

uppercase_str is 'CEA8B32E00934AAEA8C005A35D85A5C0'