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

You could use the random package:

import random
file = random.random()

Answer 2

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

Answer 3

>>> import random
>>> import string    
>>> alias = ''.join(random.choice(string.ascii_letters) for _ in range(16))
>>> alias
'WrVkPmjeSOgTmCRG'

You could change 'string.ascii_letters' to any string format as you like to generate any other text, for example mobile NO, ID...

Answer 4

The OP requested to create random filenames not random files. Times and UUIDs can collide. If you are working on a single machine (not a shared filesystem) and your process/thread will not stomp on itselfk, use os.getpid() to get your own PID and use this as an element of a unique filename. Other processes would obviously not get the same PID. If you are multithreaded, get the thread id. If you have other aspects of your code in which a single thread or process could generate multiple different tempfiles, you might need to use another technique. A rolling index can work (if you aren't keeping them so long or using so many files you would worry about rollover). Keeping a global hash/index to "active" files would suffice in that case.

So sorry for the longwinded explanation, but it does depend on your exact usage.

Answer 5

Adding my two cents here:

In [19]: tempfile.mkstemp('.png', 'bingo', '/tmp')[1]
Out[19]: '/tmp/bingoy6s3_k.png'

According to the python doc for tempfile.mkstemp, it creates a temporary file in the most secure manner possible. Please note that the file will exist after this call:

In [20]: os.path.exists(tempfile.mkstemp('.png', 'bingo', '/tmp')[1])
Out[20]: True