How to generate a random String in Java [duplicate]

Generating a random string of characters is easy - just use java.util.Random and a string containing all the characters you want to be available, e.g.

public static String generateString(Random rng, String characters, int length)
{
    char[] text = new char[length];
    for (int i = 0; i < length; i++)
    {
        text[i] = characters.charAt(rng.nextInt(characters.length()));
    }
    return new String(text);
}

Now, for uniqueness you'll need to store the generated strings somewhere. How you do that will really depend on the rest of your application.


This is very nice:

http://commons.apache.org/proper/commons-lang/apidocs/org/apache/commons/lang3/RandomStringUtils.html - something like RandomStringUtils.randomNumeric(7).

There are 10^7 equiprobable (if java.util.Random is not broken) distinct values so uniqueness may be a concern.


You can also use UUID class from java.util package, which returns random uuid of 32bit characters String.

java.util.UUID.randomUUID().toString()

http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/docs/api/java/util/UUID.html