Question

I’m using the following function (which I think is pretty straight-forward) to generate a random string:

import sys
import string
import random

    def random(size=16):
        lst = [random.choice(string.ascii_letters + string.digits) for n in xrange(size)]
        str = "".join(lst)
        return str

However, I keep getting the following error:

AttributeError: 'function' object has no attribute 'choice'

Can someone tell me what’s wrong with my code? Google doesn’t seem to help, and I’m too new to Python to troubleshoot it effectively myself.

Answer 1

You are overriding the import random with your function definition.

The ‘random’ name in the Python namespace is now referring to you function not the random module which you intended.

Change the function name to something like random_str