Best way to generate random file names in Python

Question

In Python, what is a good, or the best way to generate some random text to prepend to a file(name) that I\'m saving to a server, just to make sure it does not overwrite. Tha

Answer 1

If you want to preserve the original filename as a part of the new filename, unique prefixes of uniform length can be generated by using MD5 hashes of the current time:

from hashlib import md5
from time import localtime

def add_prefix(filename):
    prefix = md5(str(localtime()).encode('utf-8')).hexdigest()
    return f"{prefix}_{filename}"

Calls to the add_prefix('style.css') generates sequence like:

a38ff35794ae366e442a0606e67035ba_style.css
7a5f8289323b0ebfdbc7c840ad3cb67b_style.css