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

Two methods :

import random, math

def randStr_1(chars:str, length:int) -> str:
    chars *= math.ceil(length / len(chars))
    chars = letters[0:length]
    chars = list(chars)
    random.shuffle(characters)

    return ''.join(chars)

def randStr_2(chars:str, length:int) -> str:
    return ''.join(random.choice(chars) for i in range(chars))

Benchmark :

from timeit import timeit

setup = """
import os, subprocess, time, string, random, math

def randStr_1(letters:str, length:int) -> str:
    letters *= math.ceil(length / len(letters))
    letters = letters[0:length]
    letters = list(letters)
    random.shuffle(letters)
    return ''.join(letters)

def randStr_2(letters:str, length:int) -> str:
    return ''.join(random.choice(letters) for i in range(length))
"""

print('Method 1 vs Method 2', ', run 10 times each.')

for length in [100,1000,10000,50000,100000,500000,1000000]:
    print(length, 'characters:')

    eff1 = timeit("randStr_1(string.ascii_letters, {})".format(length), setup=setup, number=10)
    eff2 = timeit("randStr_2(string.ascii_letters, {})".format(length), setup=setup, number=10)
    print('\t{}s : {}s'.format(round(eff1, 6), round(eff2, 6)))
    print('\tratio = {} : {}\n'.format(eff1/eff1, round(eff2/eff1, 2)))

Output :

Method 1 vs Method 2 , run 10 times each.

100 characters:
    0.001411s : 0.00179s
    ratio = 1.0 : 1.27

1000 characters:
    0.013857s : 0.017603s
    ratio = 1.0 : 1.27

10000 characters:
    0.13426s : 0.151169s
    ratio = 1.0 : 1.13

50000 characters:
    0.709403s : 0.855136s
    ratio = 1.0 : 1.21

100000 characters:
    1.360735s : 1.674584s
    ratio = 1.0 : 1.23

500000 characters:
    6.754923s : 7.160508s
    ratio = 1.0 : 1.06

1000000 characters:
    11.232965s : 14.223914s
    ratio = 1.0 : 1.27

The performance of first method is better.