Hey guys, so I am trying to brush up on my Python skills and was given a challenge recently to create random objects and insert them into a text file with the output not exceeding 10MB. Then I have to read the contents of the file and print back to the console every occurrence of those 4 objects and what type they are.

This was the exact challenge given to me:

Write a Python script that will generate four types of printable random objects and store them in a single file. Each object will be separated by a ",". These are the 4 data types: floats, alphabetical strings, integers, alphanumerics.

The alphanumerics should contain a random number of whitespaces before and after it (not exceeding 10 spaces). The output should be 10MB in size.

Sample extracted output:

hisadfnnasd, 126263, assfdgsga12348fas, 13123.123, lizierdjfklaasf, 123192u3kjwekhf, 89181811238,122, nmarcysfa900jkifh , 3.781, 2.11, ....

Create a program that will read the generated file above and print to the console the object and its type. Spaces before and after the alphanumeric object must be stripped.

Sample output:

youruasdifafasd - alphabetical strings 127371237 - integer asdfka12348fas - alphanumeric 13123.123 - real numbers asjdfklasdjfklaasf - alphabetical strings 123192u3kjwekhf - alphanumeric

For the first part, this is the code that I currently have:

import random
import string
import os

minLength = 5
maxLength = 30

fileName = 'output_file.txt'

open(fileName, 'w')

fileSize = os.stat(fileName).st_size

def random_alphanumerics(length):
    key = ''
    for i in range(length):
        key += random.choice(string.ascii_lowercase + string.digits)
    return key

with open(fileName, 'a') as myFile:
    while fileSize < 10485760:
        length = random.randint(minLength, maxLength)
        myAlphabets = ''.join(random.choice(string.ascii_lowercase) for x in range(length))
        myInt = random.randint(0, 10000)
        myReal = round(random.uniform(0.0, 10000.0), length)
        myAlphanumerics = random_alphanumerics(length)
        myFile.write(myAlphabets + ', {}'.format(myInt) + ', {}'.format(myReal) + ', ' + myAlphanumerics + ', ')
        fileSize = os.stat(fileName).st_size
        print(fileSize)
        if fileSize == 10485760:
          break
          print('Done')
          myFile.close()

Now I know this may not be the cleanest code, it does output to a file and creates the objects as needed. The only thing I can't figure out is how to implement the random whitespaces before and after the alphanumeric strings.

And don't even get me started on the second bit... I know regex comes into play but I haven't used Python in so long, I can't even remember Regex commands to use. Any help there would also be greatly appreciated :)

Also, feel free to tear at my code and reprimand me if need be as I want to learn from you guys hehe.

EDIT: So I redid the code from the help of u/TheLiberius and the final version is below. The only issue I have is that it it takes a long time to write the 10MB worth of data into the file. Any way to make it faster?

import random
import string
import os

### FUNCTIONS ###

# let's define a function for creating a string of random alphanumerical characters
def random_alphanumerics():
    length = random.randint(5, 30) # define the length of the alphanumeric string randomly between a range
    output = ''
    for i in range(length):
        output += random.choice(string.ascii_lowercase + string.digits) # create our alphanumeric string
    return output

# let's define a function for creating a string of random alphabetical characters
def random_string():
    length = random.randint(5, 30) # define the length of the alphabetical string randomly between a range
    output = ''.join(random.choice(string.ascii_lowercase) for x in range(length)) # we are using ascii lowercase so that encoding doesn't cause our file size to be unpredictable
    return output

# let's define a function for creating a random integers and converting them to a string
def random_int():
    output = random.randint(0, 10000)
    intToStr = '{}'.format(output)
    return intToStr

# let's define a function for creating random floats and converting them to a string
def random_float():
    length = random.randint(1, 10) # let's make sure the float is between a randomly chosen decimal place
    output = round(random.uniform(0.0, 10000.0), length)
    floatToStr = '{}'.format(output)
    return floatToStr

### time to write to our file!!! ###

# let's define our file name first
fileName = 'output_file.txt'

# we shall create and open our file
open(fileName, 'w')

# let's check the initial size of the file which should be 0
fileSize = os.stat(fileName).st_size

# alright let's open the file and append data to it
with open(fileName, 'a') as myFile:
    while fileSize < 10485760: # run the loop until fileSize is 10485760 bytes which should be shown as 10MB in any OS but in reality it is 10.48MB in actuality
        function_list = [random_alphanumerics, random_string, random_int, random_float] # put our functions into a list
        dataType = random.choice(function_list) # randomly choose a function to run
        if dataType == random_alphanumerics: # our alphanumeric string needs to have whitespaces before and after it so let's use an if statement for that
            output = random_alphanumerics()
            i = random.randint(0, 9) # the whitespaces shouldn't be more than 9
            output = ' '*i + output + ' '*i # put them altogether
        else:
            output = dataType()
        myFile.write(output + ', ')
        fileSize = os.stat(fileName).st_size
        print(fileSize)
    # once loop is done, print final file size and close file
    print('Final file size:', fileSize / 1000000, 'MB')
    myFile.close()