On Mon, Dec 26, 2011 at 12:48 AM, Steven D'Aprano <steve+comp.lang.pyt...@pearwood.info> wrote: > On Sun, 25 Dec 2011 08:30:46 -0500, Roy Smith wrote: > >> I want to create a string of 20 random digits (I'm OK with leading >> zeros). The best I came up with is: >> >> ''.join(str(random.randint(0, 9)) for i in range(20)) >> >> Is there something better? > > '%20d' % random.randint(0, 10**20-1)
I should mention that this sort of thing is absolutely acceptable in situations where you don't actually need that level of randomness; if you want to assign 20-digit numbers to each of ten million objects, you can happily use something that's only really random to fifteen. I use this technique with base 36 numbers to generate arbitrary alphanumeric strings to use as message tags, for instance; fill out a specified field size, even though not every combination will actually be used. ChrisA -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
