Password Generator in Swift

Simple password generator in Swift.

One day I was chatting with other iOS devs and someone posted an example of password generator code. The code featured “for-i-in” loops and other things which didn’t look much swifty to my eye.

I tried to find a real application for nice Swift features like generators, sequences and some functional methods like reduce. I went through a number of iterations to get to the final state. Here’s the code I eventually came up with.

import Foundation

struct PasswordGenerator: SequenceType {
    let length: Int
    let characters: Set<Character>

    func generate() -> GeneratorOf<Character> {
        var currentLength: Int = 0
        return GeneratorOf<Character> {
            let randomIndex = Int(arc4random_uniform(UInt32(count(self.characters))))
            let setIndex = advance(self.characters.startIndex, randomIndex)
            return (currentLength++ < self.length ? self.characters[setIndex] : nil)
          }
    }

    func password() -> String {
        return reduce(self, "") { (pwd: String, char: Character) -> String in
            "".join([pwd, String(char)])
        }
    }
}

let characters = Set("АБВГДAAAAbCd1234567890-=!@#$%^&*()_+QWE˙ÎÓÔ◊ı´¨°•RTYUIOP{}ASDFGHJKL:\"ZXCVBNM<>?")

let passwordGenerator = PasswordGenerator(length: 10, characters: characters)

println(passwordGenerator.password())
println(passwordGenerator.password())
println(passwordGenerator.password())
println(passwordGenerator.password())

As you can see this code is using Swift 1.2 features, such as new Set data type.

The general idea is to create a password generator for a given set of characters to generate passwords of the given length. I’m not claiming here that this is the best design ever. Probably it would be better to have a function that takes a set of characters and password length as an input and then do all heavy lifting in that function.

However, let’s walk through this code.

The PasswordGenerator is a sequence since it conforms to SequenceType protocol. As part of protocol implementation this struct needs to implement generate() function that returns another Swift type Generator. In this example I’m generating characters for a password, so I chose to initialize password generator with a set of characters (characters) and length of the password to be generated (length).

Note that I’m not using any unicode specific code at all. That’s the beauty of String type in Swift. Since String conforms to the very same SequenceType it can easily be converted to an array or a set, and what’s even better, it will be an array or a set of unicode characters.

OK, so back to PasswordGenerator. generate() function returns generator of Character where GeneratorOf is another Swift generic type useful to declare generators of a certain type. Inside the function I’m creating a generator of Character with a closure, this closure captures currentLength variable as well as self. The closure first generates a random index of an element in the set using good old arc4random_uniform. The randomIndex is of type Int and can not be used as a set index. The set index in this case needs to be of type SetIndex<Character>. To get set index I’m using standard library function advance that gives me a randomIndex set index equivalent for a set. Finally I can get a character from the set, incrementing currentLength and comparing it to self.length along the lines to know when to stop. Note the use of self, this is required because it’s a closure.

Last step is to implement password() function that actually generates passwords. This is where I can use the fact that PasswordGenerator is a sequence. Thanks to that I am able to use standard library reduce on self. Reduce iterates through the sequence on each step getting a random element from the characters set it then appends new character to accumulator string using join function.

Without a single for-i-in loop I get a simple password generator that demoes beauty and flexibility of Swift and is yet open for further improvements.