# Solution: A Better Password Generator¶

Yesterday we looked at a simple password generator to make a string from a group of random characters. Your assignment was to improve on that to add capital letters and numbers to the password. The simplest solution to that problem is to extend our alphabet string to include capital letters and numbers as follows:

Now, the problem with this solution is that it may require you to run the program a few times in order to get it to give you a password that meets the requirements of uppercase, lowercase, and a number. One way to guarantee that we will have at least one uppercase and one lowercase letter is to first generate a password of all lower case letters, and then randomly select one or more of the letters to replace with an uppercase letter and one or more of the letters to replace with a number. To Make sure we don’t ‘accidentally’ replace our numbers with uppercase characters or vice-versa, we will put the numbers in the first half of the password, and the capital letters in the second half of the password.

Now lets look at a few of the statements in the above example in detail. First lets consider the two for statements. The first for statement uses range len(mypw)//2 This ensures that we are only going to replace characters at index positions 0 through the halfway point. The second for statement uses range(len(mypw)//2,len(mypw)) to ensure that we replace characters in the second half of the list. If you aren’t convinced that this works you should revisit the range function or experiment with the range function in an activecode window.

Next consider the following statment:

mypw = mypw[0:replace_index] + str(random.randrange(10)) + mypw[replace_index+1:]


This line uses the slice operator to keep all the characters from the beginning of the string up to, but not including, the character we want to replace mypw[0:replace_index] next, we select a random digit and convert it to a string using the str function. Finally we concatenate the rest of the password starting with the character after the one we replaced going to the end of the string mypw[replace_index+1:] the [n:] notation means start at character n and go to the end of the string.

The other line that uses cancatenation and slicing is:

mypw = mypw[0:replace_index] + mypw[replace_index].upper() + mypw[replace_index+1:]


This uses the exact same slicing concepts as in the previous example, but rather than choosing a new random upper case letter we use the string method .upper() to replace the lower case character with its upper case counter part.

Now there are many other ways to code this program. If you know about if statements (read here) or would like to learn about if statements this can be written in a completely different way. For example you might use one or more variables to remember whether you have used a number or a capital letter. Or you might write some code to determine whether the password has a capital letter or a number in it.

Before we move on, I want to give you one more example of how to write this program that combines lists, with another important string method. Very often you will find yourself wanting to shift back and forth between lists of things and strings. In particular in this example we will use the join method to construct a string from a list of characters.

The idea behind this solution is to create a list of characters that include all of our requirements: upper case, lower case, and numbers. We’ll create a list of characters that looks like this:

['a', 'T', '1', 'h', 'X', '6', 's', 'v']


Now this list has a definite pattern to it: lower case, followed by upper case, followed by a number, with the last few characters all in lower case. Since a pattern like this isn’t a good thing in passwords, we will use the shuffle function in the random module to randomly scramble the list.

Here is the code:

At this point you may have a question about why we have two for loops in the above program. Notice the call to range in the first loop: range(pw_len//3). Because each pass through the loop adds three things to the list we only want to go through the list pw_len//3 times or we would create a list of strings that is way too long. What is the purpose of the next loop? To fill out any remaining characters that are needed in case our password length is not evenly divisible by 3. Another approach would be to simply over fill the list in the first place and use the slice operator to cut it back to the right size. See if you can modify the code above to do that.

For our next installment, we are going to look at a password generator that is inspired by my favorite comic:

But while you are waiting, here’s a little assignment for you that is just a bit of a diversion from the password project. Suppose you couldn’t use the shuffle method from the random module.

• Write a python program that takes a string and shuffles the characters in the string into a random order.

• Redo the above program but assume you have a list of characters rather than a string.

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