PYTHON : How do I make my program produce a file with a random file name

Question

import time

a = 0
amount = 1
while a < 100:
    userfile = 'random{}'.format(amount)
    file = open(userfile, 'a')
    amount += 1
    time.sleep(0.2)
    print(userfile)
    a += 1

I've made a program that creates files with a fixed file name. I'm trying to make it so the file name is a randomly generated set of letters but I don't know quite how to apply the random function to it.

You may be looking for something like the [tempfile library](https://docs.python.org/3/library/tempfile.html). — user3030010, Dec 06 '16 at 20:30
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/18319101/whats-the-best-way-to-generate-random-strings-of-a-specific-length-in-python — Sash Sinha, Dec 06 '16 at 20:33

score 2 · Answer 1 · answered Dec 06 '16 at 20:39

2

The tempfile module provides just what you want:

import tempfile

random_filename = tempfile.mktemp(dir="")

Sample output: tmp4STAXd

The method supports some helpful arguments that you can checkout in the docs.

answered Dec 06 '16 at 20:39

sirfz

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score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Dec 06 '16 at 20:32

You could use something like this :

import string
import random

N = 10
print ''.join(random.SystemRandom().choice(string.ascii_letters) for _ in range(N)) #=> izWIzBXltM or AZlkWOoTGY or ...

Use

print ''.join(random.SystemRandom().choice(string.ascii_lowercase) for _ in range(N))

If you need lowercase only.

furas · Answer 3 · 2016-12-06T20:40:22.540

You can use string.ascii_letters to get list of letters and random.choice() to select random letter from list. If you use for and range() then you can get many random letters and later join() them into string.

import string
import random

letters = [random.choice(string.ascii_letters) for x in range(10)]

filename = ''.join(letters)

print(filename)

Docs: string, random

You have also string.ascii_lowercase, string.digits, etc. so you can use ie.

string.ascii_lowercase + string.digits

PYTHON : How do I make my program produce a file with a random file name

3 Answers3