Best way to generate random file names in Python

python random hash
zallarak picture zallarak · May 8, 2012 · Viewed 91.2k times · Source

In Python, what is a good, or the best way to generate some random text to prepend to a file(name) that I'm saving to a server, just to make sure it does not overwrite. Thank you!

Answer

Óscar López picture Óscar López · May 8, 2012

You could use the UUID module for generating a random string:

import uuid
filename = str(uuid.uuid4())

This is a valid choice, given that an UUID generator is extremely unlikely to produce a duplicate identifier (a file name, in this case):

Only after generating 1 billion UUIDs every second for the next 100 years, the probability of creating just one duplicate would be about 50%. The probability of one duplicate would be about 50% if every person on earth owns 600 million UUIDs.

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