Creating a word from a random set of specific letters

Question

I'm trying to generate a word with a specific set of letters.

The first letter of the word must contain the letters P,G,T,K the second A,E,I,O,U

I have tried generating them with the code blow with no success. Once I store all of these random letters as variables I will then join them together to make the randomized word

letter1 = rand(80,84,75,71).chr
letter2 = rand(97,101,105,111,117,121).chr

name = letter1 + letter2 + letter2 + letter1 + letter2

puts name

how is that name obtained? always 5 chars? always 1 2 2 1 2? — tokland, Jul 07 '11 at 20:18

DigitalRoss · Accepted Answer · 2011-07-07T20:47:29.977

4

puts 'PGTK'[rand(4), 1] + 'AEIOU'[rand(5), 1]

For some real fun, use actual noise-derived entropy:

def noise_index s
  s[@f.sysread(1).unpack('C').first/256.0*s.length, 1]
end
def run
  open '/dev/random', 'r' do |f|
    @f = f
    100.times do
      puts noise_index('PGTK') + noise_index('AEIOU')
    end
  end
end

edited Jul 07 '11 at 20:47

answered Jul 07 '11 at 20:12

DigitalRoss

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1

actually you have to repeat that a bit but that's the essence of it – Pablo Fernandez Jul 07 '11 at 20:13
1

Note that under Ruby 1.9+ you don't need the `,1` i.e. `'PGTK'[rand 4]` – Phrogz Jul 07 '11 at 22:19
@Phrogz, sure, and also, `unpack('C').first` can be `ord`. (I try to post widely-compatible examples.) – DigitalRoss Jul 08 '11 at 00:08

score 2 · Answer 2 · answered Jul 07 '11 at 20:22

2

If you need just a final word of two letters:

['PGTK', 'AEIOU'].map { |s| s.chars.to_a.sample }.join

Or following the example in your question:

letter1, letter2 = ['PGTK', 'AEIOU'].map { |s| s.chars.to_a.sample }
name = letter1 + letter2 + letter2 + letter1 + letter2

answered Jul 07 '11 at 20:22

tokland

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Thank you for the great feedback! Both were excellent suggestions. The was the first use I have seen of .map. Just learning ruby and love seeing all of these different ways of achieving the end goal :) – ScrubDubbins Jul 07 '11 at 20:32

Creating a word from a random set of specific letters

2 Answers2