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Generating a large random string

Andreas Lobinger andreas.lobinger at netsurf.de
Fri Feb 20 05:07:27 EST 2004 
Aloha,

Andreas Lobinger schrieb:
> How to generate (memory and time)-efficient a string containing
> random characters? 

> d = [random.choice(string.letters) for x in xrange(3000)]
> s = "".join(d)

1) Sorry for starting a new thread, but there were calls for more spec.
2) Thanks for all replies so far.

To be more specific about
- OS/availability of /dev/random
Im looking for an elegant solution for all types. At the moment i'm 
developing in parallel on a slow (250MHz) i86/Win95 notebook, a typical
i86/linux box and a couple of SUNs (up to 16GB main-mem...).

- using random / crypto-safe-strings
The use of random is intended, because it generates a known sequence.
I can store the seed an re-generate the sequence any time, and afaik
the sequence is OS/machinetype independent.

As i wrote in the original post, the random string is only a prerequisite
for another question.

- What to do with the string
I use the sting as a testpattern for a tokenizer/parser. So the usage
of string.letters is only used as an example here.

The main question was: 
How to concat a string without contantly reallocating it.

Wishing a happy day
		LOBI
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