In today's digital age, it's important to have strong and secure passwords to protect your personal and sensitive information. However, coming up with new and unique passwords can be difficult and time-consuming. That's where a password generator comes in handy. In this article, we will be building a simple yet customizable password generator using Python.

The Code

We'll start by defining the password_generator function, which takes five parameters: password_length, use_lowercase, use_uppercase, use_digits, and use_symbols. The password_length parameter determines the length of the generated password. The other parameters determine which character sets to include in the password. If a parameter is set to True, the corresponding character set will be included in the password. If a parameter is set to False, it will be excluded.

import random
import string

def password_generator(password_length, use_lowercase, use_uppercase, use_digits, use_symbols):
    # Define the character sets for the password based on the input
    characters = ""
    if use_lowercase:
        characters += string.ascii_lowercase
    if use_uppercase:
        characters += string.ascii_uppercase
    if use_digits:
        characters += string.digits
    if use_symbols:
        characters += "!@#$%^&*()_+=-"

    # Use random.choices() to generate a password of the desired length
    password = "".join(random.choices(characters, k=password_length))
    return password

The function uses the string module's ascii_lowercase and ascii_uppercase constants to define the lowercase and uppercase characters, respectively. The string module's digits constant defines the digit characters. The symbols are defined as a string of commonly used symbols.

The random.choices() function is used to generate a password of the desired length. The function generates a list of random characters from the characters string and then joins the list into a single string using the join() method.

User Input

Next, we'll prompt the user for the desired password length and the character sets to include in the password.

# Prompt the user for the desired password length
password_length = int(input("Enter desired password length: "))

# Prompt the user for the character sets to include in the password
use_lowercase = input("Include lowercase characters? (y/n): ").lower() == "y"
use_uppercase = input("Include uppercase characters? (y/n): ").lower() == "y"
use_digits = input("Include digits? (y/n): ").lower() == "y"
use_symbols = input("Include symbols? (y/n): ").lower() == "y"

The user inputs are converted to boolean values using the comparison operator == "y". If the user enters "y", the corresponding parameter will be set to True, otherwise it will be set to False.

Output

~ python password_generator.py

Enter desired password length: 25
Include lowercase characters? (y/n): n
Include uppercase characters? (y/n): y
Include digits? (y/n): y
Include symbols? (y/n): y
Generated password: 6P&Y1FU(^5_6RL5!$LWKJ4#+W

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