Python - Batteries included

It has often been said that Python comes with batteries included. This refers to the fact that it has a rich set of utilities included in the standard library. In the following program, the main program is a single line of code. It was made possible partly by the functions included in the random module. If we had made the specifications a bit tighter, we could have reduced the number of lines significantly.

Here is what the program does: We would like to generate passwords (or some other random string), but we want to be able to specify a template. For example, we may want to specify that each password is 7 lowercase characters. In this case we would use the template 'aaaaaaa'. Suppose we wanted a password that looks like a Victorian (Victoria, Australia) number plate, we would specify the template 'AAA-999', in other words, three random letters followed by a hyphen followed by three random digits. Finally, we may want to generate a simple password that is easy to remember by making it pronouncable - so we generate it using the following template: 'Cvcvc' The 'c' will be replaced by a consonant and the 'v' by a vowel, giving us something like, maybe, 'Gamir'.

Here is the program:

import string
import random

vowels_upper = 'AEIOU'
vowels_lower = 'aeiou'
consonants_upper = 'BCDFGHJKLMNPQRSTVWXYZ'
consonants_lower = 'bcdfghjklmnpqrstvwxyz'
alphanumeric = string.letters + string.digits
recognize = {
'A': string.ascii_uppercase, 'a': string.ascii_lowercase,
'C': consonants_upper, 'c': consonants_lower, 
'V': vowels_upper, 'v': vowels_lower, 
'd': string.digits, 'x': alphanumeric}

def create_password(template):
return ''.join([random.choice(recognize[ch]) 
if ch in recognize else ch for ch in template])

if __name__ == '__main__':
for i in range(5):
print create_password('AAA-ddd')

for i in range(5):
print create_password('Cvcvc')

When we run the above program, we get the following output:

MOI-138
KMQ-882
UCH-536
LBK-734
MGA-798
Wewof
Roqug
Colud
Gokix
Berid

That's quite a lot of power for what is essentially one line of code.