Here’s a tidbit I picked up from Stack Overflow (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2823316/generate-a-random-letter-in-python) that I found helpful. I found the need to generate a random string of digits, but didn’t want to just loop and concatenate. I was pretty sure there was a more Pythonic way to do this, and turns out I was right. I’m going to first show the solution, then we’ll break it down to explain what each little piece is doing.

"".join(random.choice(string.ascii_letters) for i in range(8))

So the above may seem a bit anti-climatic but it demonstrates the raw expressiveness of the Python language. So I’d like to break this down a bit to explain the parts.

In the above screenshot you will see the code string.ascii_letters produces both a lower and uppercase alphabet in a single string. This will be the source from which we will pull letters from to produce our random string.

In this screenshot we are using random.choice(). This method will select a value from a string at random. So when we pass our alphabet random.choice() will pick a letter from it at random.

Now we get to see the string’s join() method in action. The syntax may seem backwards, but try reading it like this: *Using a comma concatenate each of the characters in the string 12345. As you can see the result is a comma-delimited number set.

This final screenshot shows the whole thing in action. We want to join using blank (so there will no delimiter) a random choice from the alphabet, and do this eight (8) times. The loop for i in range(8) does the actual loop using a loop comprehension.

I hope this was mildy informative and useful. Cheers, and happy coding!