How to generate a random string of a fixed length in Go?

I want a random string of characters only (uppercase or lowercase), no numbers, in Go. What is the fastest and simplest way to do this?

Paul's solution provides a simple, general solution.

The question asks for the "the fastest and simplest way". Let's address the fastest part too. We'll arrive at our final, fastest code in an iterative manner. Benchmarking each iteration can be found at the end of the answer.

All the solutions and the benchmarking code can be found on the Go Playground. The code on the Playground is a test file, not an executable. You have to save it into a file named XX_test.go and run it with

go test -bench . -benchmem

Foreword:

The fastest solution is not a go-to solution if you just need a random string. For that, Paul's solution is perfect. This is if performance does matter. Although the first 2 steps (Bytes and Remainder) might be an acceptable compromise: they do improve performance by like 50% (see exact numbers in the II. Benchmark section), and they don't increase complexity significantly.

Having said that, even if you don't need the fastest solution, reading through this answer might be adventurous and educational.
I. Improvements

1. Genesis (Runes)

As a reminder, the original, general solution we're improving is this:

func init() {
    rand.Seed(time.Now().UnixNano())
}

var letterRunes = []rune("abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ")

func RandStringRunes(n int) string {
    b := make([]rune, n)
    for i := range b {
        b[i] = letterRunes[rand.Intn(len(letterRunes))]
    }
    return string(b)
}

1. Bytes

If the characters to choose from and assemble the random string contains only the uppercase and lowercase letters of the English alphabet, we can work with bytes only because the English alphabet letters map to bytes 1-to-1 in the UTF-8 encoding (which is how Go stores strings).

So instead of:

var letters = []rune("abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ")

we can use:

var letters = []byte("abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ")

Or even better:

const letters = "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ"

Now this is already a big improvement: we could achieve it to be a const (there are string constants but there are no slice constants). As an extra gain, the expression len(letters) will also be a const! (The expression len(s) is constant if s is a string constant.)

And at what cost? Nothing at all. strings can be indexed which indexes its bytes, perfect, exactly what we want.

Our next destination looks like this:

const letterBytes = "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ"

func RandStringBytes(n int) string {
    b := make([]byte, n)
    for i := range b {
        b[i] = letterBytes[rand.Intn(len(letterBytes))]
    }
    return string(b)
}

1. Remainder

Previous solutions get a random number to designate a random letter by calling rand.Intn() which delegates to Rand.Intn() which delegates to Rand.Int31n().

This is much slower compared to rand.Int63() which produces a random number with 63 random bits.

So we could simply call rand.Int63() and use the remainder after dividing by len(letterBytes):

func RandStringBytesRmndr(n int) string {
    b := make([]byte, n)
    for i := range b {
        b[i] = letterBytes[rand.Int63() % int64(len(letterBytes))]
    }
    return string(b)
}

This works and is significantly faster, the disadvantage is that the probability of all the letters will not be exactly the same (assuming rand.Int63() produces all 63-bit numbers with equal probability). Although the distortion is extremely small as the number of letters 52 is much-much smaller than 1To make this understand easier: let's say you want a random number in the range of 0..5. Using 3 random bits, this would produce the numbers 0..1 with double probability than from the range 2..5. Using 5 random bits, numbers in range 0..1 would occur with 6/32 probability and numbers in range 2..5 with 5/32 probability which is now closer to the desired. Increasing the number of bits makes this less significant, when reaching 63 bits, it is negligible.

1. Masking

Building on the previous solution, we can maintain the equal distribution of letters by using only as many of the lowest bits of the random number as many is required to represent the number of letters. So for example if we have 52 letters, it requires 6 bits to represent it: 52 = 110100b. So we will only use the lowest 6 bits of the number returned by rand.Int63(). And to maintain equal distribution of letters, we only "accept" the number if it falls in the range 0..len(letterBytes)-1. If the lowest bits are greater, we discard it and query a new random number.

Note that the chance of the lowest bits to be greater than or equal to len(letterBytes) is less than 0.5 in general (0.25 on average), which means that even if this would be the case, repeating this "rare" case decreases the chance of not finding a good number. After n` repetition, the chance that we still d

Stack Overflow Q#22892120, score: 1302