Generate a random string (password)

Random string

This code generates a random string of numbers and characters from the Swedish alphabet (which includes the non-ASCII characters å, ä and ö).

rand.Seed(time.Now().UnixNano())
chars := []rune("ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZÅÄÖ" +
	"abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzåäö" +
	"0123456789")
length := 8
var b strings.Builder
for i := 0; i < length; i++ {
	b.WriteRune(chars[rand.Intn(len(chars))])
}
str := b.String() // E.g. "ExcbsVQs"

Warning: To generate a password, you should use cryptographically secure pseudorandom numbers. See User-friendly access to crypto/rand.

Random string with restrictions

This code generates a random ASCII string with at least one digit and one special character.

rand.Seed(time.Now().UnixNano())
digits := "0123456789"
specials := "~=+%^*/()[]{}/!@#$?|"
all := "ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ" +
	"abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz" +
	digits + specials
length := 8
buf := make([]byte, length)
buf[0] = digits[rand.Intn(len(digits))]
buf[1] = specials[rand.Intn(len(specials))]
for i := 2; i < length; i++ {
	buf[i] = all[rand.Intn(len(all))]
}
rand.Shuffle(len(buf), func(i, j int) {
	buf[i], buf[j] = buf[j], buf[i]
})
str := string(buf) // E.g. "3i[g0|)z"

Before Go 1.10

In code before Go 1.10, replace the call to rand.Shuffle with this code:

for i := len(buf) - 1; i > 0; i-- { // Fisher–Yates shuffle
	j := rand.Intn(i + 1)
	buf[i], buf[j] = buf[j], buf[i]
}

Further reading

Generate random numbers, characters and slice elements

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