Hi everyone, I just wanted to know what is the best way to convert an entire list to a simple string element. I was trying out stuff I learned by coding a (very) simple password generator and I am stuck at figuring out how to output the password as a single string (without the empty spaces and brackets) instead of getting the entire array.

My code :

import string
import random
letters = list(string.ascii_lowercase)

#Generates a random password with default value of 3 numbers and 3 letters (x and y arguments)
def password_gen(x=3, y=3):

  char_list = []

  #Returns a random letter
  def add_letter() :
  return random.choice(letters)

  #Returns a random number (0-9)
  def add_number() :
  return int(random.random()*10)

  #Loops to add the correct number of random characters
  i = 0
  while i < x :
    char_list.append(add_letter())
    i+=1
    i=0
  while i < y :
    char_list.append(add_number())
    i+=1
  
  #Shuffles the list and returns it as the generated password
  random.shuffle(char_list)
  return char_list

password = str(password_gen(5, 5))
print(password)

Currently the output gives something looking like this : ['p', 3, 5, 9, 'o', 'v', 'a', 9, 't', 3] and I want it to look like this p359ova9t3

Hopefully I can explain this properly. I have no control over how the input string which is kind of formatted like a list of lists but without quotes (so I can't use json.loads)

Example input (I'm reading it in using sys.argv):

"[[a,1],[b,2]]"

I'd like to convert this to be a real list of lists so I can iterate through them in my script.

I can get what I need using split but I was wondering if there was a better way to do it. Either a better way to divide them or a way to add quotes - whatever works.

import sys

try1 = sys.argv[1]
lst1 = try1.split("],")
print("try #1 (works but could be better?)")
print(len(lst1))
for item in lst1:
    print(item.lstrip("[[").rstrip("]]"))

# doesn't work - 1 item in the list
print("\n\nTry #2")
try2 = sys.argv[1:]
print(len(try2))

# doesn't work - length of 13
print("\n\nTry #3")
print(len(list(sys.argv[1])))

Output

$ python3 t.py "[[a,1],[b,2]]"
try #1 (works but could be better?)
2
a,1
b,2


Try #2
1


Try #3
13

Thanks for reading