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pythonpython-3.xstringrandom

A random string of ascii_letters + digits, but only starts with a letter

I'm using the following simple code to generate a random string of length 10

from string import ascii_letters, digits
''.join(choice(ascii_letters + digits) for i in range(10))

The problem is that sometimes the first character of the string is a digit. I don't want that. I want the first character to be always a letter, and what comes after I don't care about.

I can solve this problem to joining two strings (one of length 1 and the other of length 9), and generating the first one based on the ascii_letters alone. However, I was wondering if there's a simpler approach.

Solution

  • You can also use random.choices():

    result = random.choice(ascii_letters) + ''.join(random.choices(ascii_letters + digits, k=9))

    to select k elements. No need for range or for.