I use this function all the time, most recently for some anti-spam techniques, and it’s worth posting somewhere. It’s modified from an entry on the activestate cookbook.

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def random_chars(length):
    import random
    allowed_chars = "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwzyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWZYZ0123456789"
    word = ""
    for i in xrange(0, length):
        word = word + allowed_chars[random.randint(0,0xffffff) % len(allowed_chars)]
    return word

Also, for anyone who knows me and is interested: my surgery went well and I’m recovering faster than I would have expected. Hopefully I’ll be back to 100% speed in the next few days!

Anyways, hopefully this small code snippet is useful to someone else, as well!