5 Swift Extensions to Generate Randoms

Using Swift extensions to generate random numbers, characters and, more

Photo by Alejandro Garay on Unsplash

Two principal industries use random numbers regularly. The games industry and the cryptographic one. So I thought it might make an interesting article to put together a collection of random number routines —

Now, I spare you the code to generate a random number, because you surely already know that, let us jump in with well — with more. Most of the extensions presented are cryptographically safe, with the caveat noted on Apple’s man page — a caveat that says — cryptographic quality may vary across platforms.

A Random Character

Looking beyond Int, Double, and Bool randoms then I want a random Character, here is an extension to do that:

A Random String

As you well know Characters are not strings in swift, so here is a routine to return a random string [one or more characters, yes it is confusing].

A Self Sourced Random String

Now, maybe you want to supply your own string of characters and get a random selection back. Here are a couple of extensions to do just that. The first takes an array of strings. The second takes a single string.

Here is another take on the same thing — done differently. As you can see this takes an array of strings.