how to generate random string...?

[Damodara Reddy]

I need to generate a random key with 4 chars,
for example anmk, lopu....etc.,.
how can I do this..?

Thanks in Advance
Damodara Reddy

[Campbell Ritchie]

More a beginner's question.

Chars are numbers, you do know that? So you can create a random number in the requisite range (for lower-case letters 0x61 to 0x7a inclusive) and cast it to a char. Then repeat three times.

[Stan James]

You might want to omit vowels to avoid naughty words in however many langauges your users might know. You can make an array of acceptable letters, digits, punctuation, etc and pick them out randomly, or even use Arrays.shuffle() to mix them up and take the first four (which has the non-random property of no duplicates.)

[Srikanth Ramu]

If you want to generate random numbers its simple and follow as suggested in the above posts. However if you want to generate a key based on some input values then regenerate the input values based on the key, then you need to have a proper alogrithm to encode and decode keys.