How to generate a random string with Python.

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Hello everyone, welcome back to my blog. Today I will talk about how to generate a random string with Python. As a developer developing random strings is a vital task. I am working on a simple URL shortener app with Django. I will bring another article on that project as well.

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Importing modules.

To get our job done, we have to import two important modules. They are built-in and no need to use PIP to install.

1. random module.
2. string module.

here we use the random module to choose some random characters which are provided by the string module.

you can use the following piece of code to import them.

import random

import string

Writing the function

To generate the random string we can create a function that returns the random string whenever we call.

def create_string(size = 10, chars = string.ascii_lowercase+string.digits):

    return "".join(random.choice(chars) for _ in range(size))

here we can adjust the size of the string. I have set it to 10. Each time we call it it will return a random string of 10 characters. 

chars is the parameter that contains the list of characters we can use to create the random string.

Characters.

we can simply get the lists of characters with the help of the string module.

You can simply visit this support article: https://docs.python.org/3/library/string.html to learn more.

you can add the lists together using the + operator.

 

Function Breakdown.

Here we tell python to join characters together with an empty string. if we use

"-".join(...)  instead of the empty string it will return a random string like this:

s-s-3-b-d-w-9-9-9-z

Then we tell python to choose random characters from the chars using a for-loop.

We can use the following code to understand the above one-line code. 

def generate(size=10,chars=string.ascii_letters+string.digits):

    selected_chars = []

    for _ in range(size):

        char = random.choice(chars)

        selected_chars.append(char)

    return "".join(selected_chars)

print(generate())

this will return the same result.

If you have any questions, please let me know in the comment section.

Final Code.

import random,string

def create_string(size = 10, chars = string.ascii_lowercase+string.digits):

    return "-".join(random.choice(chars) for _ in range(size))

create_string()

It is a simple 4-line code.

Thank you for reading and don't forget to share this if you learned something new.