Random string generation with upper case letters and digits

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

Answer 1

A simpler, faster but slightly less random way is to use random.sample instead of choosing each letter separately, If n-repetitions are allowed, enlarge your random basis by n times e.g.

import random
import string

char_set = string.ascii_uppercase + string.digits
print ''.join(random.sample(char_set*6, 6))

Note: random.sample prevents character reuse, multiplying the size of the character set makes multiple repetitions possible, but they are still less likely then they are in a pure random choice. If we go for a string of length 6, and we pick 'X' as the first character, in the choice example, the odds of getting 'X' for the second character are the same as the odds of getting 'X' as the first character. In the random.sample implementation, the odds of getting 'X' as any subsequent character are only 6/7 the chance of getting it as the first character