Creating a password with random number in powershell

Question

I am new to powershell. I am stuck with a problem, can you please help me out?

I have the following:

   $firstname = @("Harris", "Robin", "Jack", "Ryan")
   $lastname = @("Brown", "Amber", "Layton", "Hatvani")

from this 2 array I have to create a password and the criteria is take the first letter from first and lastname then 5 random numbers with them. example: hb69248 (in this case h is the first letter of Harris, b is the first letter of Brown). This has to be done for each of the names. I tried the following:

      [string]$p = for ($i=0; $i -lt $firstname.count; $i++)
                   { $firstname[$i].substring(0,1)}

      [string]$n = for ($r=0; $r -lt 4; $r++)
                { get-random -minimum 0 -maximum 9)

      $password = "$p", "$n" -join ""

The output should be like HRJR2876 (the numbers are creating randomly). But I am getting H R J R2 8 7 6. can you guys tell me why I am having the space in between them??in this case I just worked with the firstname not with the last name

Answer 1

When you cast an array to a string (like you do $p and $n), PowerShell uses the output field separator - represented by the $OFS automatic variable - as a delimiter. $OFS defaults to a space.

You can produce the passwords in a single loop, like this:

$passwords = for($i = 0; $i -lt $firstname.Length; $i++){
  $first = $firstname[$i].Substring(0,1)
  $last = $lastname[$i].Substring(0,1)
  $number = Get-Random -Min 10000 -Max 100000
  $first,$last,$number -join ''
}

$passwords is now an array of all 4 new passwords