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 faster, easier and more flexible way to do this is to use the strgen module (pip install StringGenerator).

Generate a 6-character random string with upper case letters and digits:

>>> from strgen import StringGenerator as SG
>>> SG("[\u\d]{6}").render()
u'YZI2CI'

Get a unique list:

>>> SG("[\l\d]{10}").render_list(5,unique=True)
[u'xqqtmi1pOk', u'zmkWdUr63O', u'PGaGcPHrX2', u'6RZiUbkk2i', u'j9eIeeWgEF']

Guarantee one "special" character in the string:

>>> SG("[\l\d]{10}&[\p]").render()
u'jaYI0bcPG*0'

A random HTML color:

>>> SG("#[\h]{6}").render()
u'#CEdFCa'

etc.

We need to be aware that this:

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

might not have a digit (or uppercase character) in it.

strgen is faster in developer-time than any of the above solutions. The solution from Ignacio is the fastest run-time performing and is the right answer using the Python Standard Library. But you will hardly ever use it in that form. You will want to use SystemRandom (or fallback if not available), make sure required character sets are represented, use unicode (or not), make sure successive invocations produce a unique string, use a subset of one of the string module character classes, etc. This all requires lots more code than in the answers provided. The various attempts to generalize a solution all have limitations that strgen solves with greater brevity and expressive power using a simple template language.

It's on PyPI:

pip install StringGenerator

Disclosure: I'm the author of the strgen module.