How to generate a random string in Ruby

Question

(0...8).map { (65 + rand(26)).chr }.join

I spend too much time golfing.

(0...50).map { ('a'..'z').to_a[rand(26)] }.join

And a last one that's even more confusing, but more flexible and wastes fewer cycles:

o = [('a'..'z'), ('A'..'Z')].map(&:to_a).flatten
string = (0...50).map { o[rand(o.length)] }.join

If you want to generate some random text then use the following:

50.times.map { (0...(rand(10))).map { ('a'..'z').to_a[rand(26)] }.join }.join(" ")

this code generates 50 random word string with words length less than 10 characters and then join with space

Why not use SecureRandom?

require 'securerandom'
random_string = SecureRandom.hex

# outputs: 5b5cd0da3121fc53b4bc84d0c8af2e81 (i.e. 32 chars of 0..9, a..f)

SecureRandom also has methods for:

• base64
• random_bytes
• random_number

see: http://ruby-doc.org/stdlib-1.9.2/libdoc/securerandom/rdoc/SecureRandom.html

I use this for generating random URL friendly strings with a guaranteed maximum length:

string_length = 8
rand(36**string_length).to_s(36)

It generates random strings of lowercase a-z and 0-9. It's not very customizable but it's short and clean.

This solution generates a string of easily readable characters for activation codes; I didn't want people confusing 8 with B, 1 with I, 0 with O, L with 1, etc.

# Generates a random string from a set of easily readable characters
def generate_activation_code(size = 6)
  charset = %w{ 2 3 4 6 7 9 A C D E F G H J K M N P Q R T V W X Y Z}
  (0...size).map{ charset.to_a[rand(charset.size)] }.join
end

Others have mentioned something similar, but this uses the URL safe function.

require 'securerandom'
p SecureRandom.urlsafe_base64(5) #=> "UtM7aa8"
p SecureRandom.urlsafe_base64 #=> "UZLdOkzop70Ddx-IJR0ABg"
p SecureRandom.urlsafe_base64(nil, true) #=> "i0XQ-7gglIsHGV2_BNPrdQ=="

The result may contain A-Z, a-z, 0-9, “-” and “_”. “=” is also used if padding is true.