Generating random words in Java?

I wrote up a program that can sort words and determine any anagrams. I want to generate an array of random strings so that I can test my method's runtime.

public static String[] generateRandomWords(int numberOfWords){
String[] randomStrings = new String[numberOfWords];
Random random = Random();
    return null;
}

(m开发者_Python百科ethod stub)

I just want lowercase words of length 1-10. I read something about generating random numbers, then casting to char or something, but I didn't totally understand. If someone can show me how to generate random words, then I should easily be able to just use a for loop to insert the words into the array. Thanks!

Do you need actual English words, or just random strings that only contain letters a-z?

If you need actual English words, the only way to do it is to use a dictionary, and select words from it at random.

If you don't need English words, then something like this will do:

public static String[] generateRandomWords(int numberOfWords)
{
    String[] randomStrings = new String[numberOfWords];
    Random random = new Random();
    for(int i = 0; i < numberOfWords; i++)
    {
        char[] word = new char[random.nextInt(8)+3]; // words of length 3 through 10. (1 and 2 letter words are boring.)
        for(int j = 0; j < word.length; j++)
        {
            word[j] = (char)('a' + random.nextInt(26));
        }
        randomStrings[i] = new String(word);
    }
    return randomStrings;
}

RandomStringUtils from commons-lang

Why generating random words? When you can use some dictionaries.

If you want to generate random words of a given length, you'll either need an algorithm to determine if a given string is a word (hard), or access to a word list of all the words in a given language (easy). If it helps, here's a list of every word in the Scrabble dictionary.

Once you have a list of all words in a language, you can load those words into an ArrayList or other linear structure. You can then generate a random index into that list to get the random word.

You can call this method for each word you want to generate. Note that the probability of generating anagrams should be relatively low though.

String generateRandomWord(int wordLength) {
    Random r = new Random(); // Intialize a Random Number Generator with SysTime as the seed
    StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder(wordLength);
    for(int i = 0; i < wordLength; i++) { // For each letter in the word
        char tmp = 'a' + r.nextInt('z' - 'a'); // Generate a letter between a and z
        sb.append(tmp); // Add it to the String
    }
    return sb.toString();
}

If you want random words without using a dictionary...

1. Make a list of all the letters you want possible in your words
2. Generate a random index to pick out a letter from the list
3. Repeat until you have your desired word length

Repeat these steps for the number of words you want to generate.