DL Redden

I recently needed to be able to generate a random alphanumeric string in ActionScript 3. After a little Googling I found an example that was written in C# on this post. I could have just used the code via a remoting call but I didn’t really want to do that unless I had to.

As I read the code I realized it would be super easy to implement the same thing in AS3 and save myself the remoting call.

Here’s the C# code:

public string GetRandomString (Random rnd, int length)
{
 string charPool = "ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz1234567890";
 StringBuilder rs = new StringBuilder();

 while (length-- 0)
 rs.Append(charPool[(int)(rnd.NextDouble() * charPool.Length)]);

 return rs.ToString();
}

and now the AS3 code:

public function GenerateRandomAN(maxSize:int):String
{
   var randomAlphaNumeric:String = "";
   // Purposefully omitting 1, I, 0 and O since they look similar
   var charPool:String = "ABCDEFGHJKLMNPQRSTUVWXYZ23456789";
   var randomNumberUnder100:int;

   for (var i:int = 0; i < maxSize; i++)
   {
      randomNumberUnder100 = Math.floor((Math.random() * 100));
      var position:int = randomNumberUnder100 % (charPool.length - 1);
      randomAlphaNumeric += charPool.charAt(position);
   }

   return randomAlphaNumeric;
}