How to generate a random alpha-numeric string

Question

I\'ve been looking for a simple Java algorithm to generate a pseudo-random alpha-numeric string. In my situation it would be used as a unique session/key identifie

Answer 1

I think this is the smallest solution here, or nearly one of the smallest:

 public String generateRandomString(int length) {
    String randomString = "";

    final char[] chars = "ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz01234567890".toCharArray();
    final Random random = new Random();
    for (int i = 0; i < length; i++) {
        randomString = randomString + chars[random.nextInt(chars.length)];
    }

    return randomString;
}

The code works just fine. If you are using this method, I recommend you to use more than 10 characters. A collision happens at 5 characters / 30362 iterations. This took 9 seconds.