How to Generate random string in elixir?

Recently I was building an app for Banking. There was a need of dummy data to play around.

So I played around a few functions and sharing my learnings. I prefer to avoid any external library.

:random.generate_uniform(9999)

generates a random number from 1 to 9999.

I needed a four digit number, so I went with the

Enum.random(1000..9999)

This gives us any random rumber in above range, so its 4 digit.

Above functions are for numbers. What if we need a alphanumeric string?

I used the following

:crypto.strong_rand_bytes(10)

it will generate a string with length 10, but the problem is, it also has special characters like - or =.

also, it is a bitstring and we need to convert it into a string.

:crypto.strong_rand_bytes(10) |> Base.encode64(padding: false)

and the results are

iex(9)> :crypto.strong_rand_bytes(10) |> Base.encode64(padding: false)
"Q+XhptjdPfc9ng"       # <<<------ notice the + sign
iex(10)> :crypto.strong_rand_bytes(10) |> Base.encode64(padding: false)
"dQv0bPYSXFrd4A"
iex(11)> :crypto.strong_rand_bytes(10) |> Base.encode64(padding: false)
"pq+uTlVgLEHvdg" # <<<------ notice the + sign
iex(12)>

Watch this place to find out what did I finally choose for a random alphanumeric string. You can mail me your best answer.

You can find the implemented code here. Just playing around. A Teller app

references:

An answer on Elixir Forum

gist by Ahmad Shah, a randomizer