Why does '.join()' insert individual characters from an integer instead of the entire string?

Understanding the ".join()" Method in Python

The ".join()" method is an essential string manipulation tool in Python that allows developers to efficiently concatenate multiple strings. This method takes a list of strings and joins them together by inserting a specified separator between each element.

In your example, you encountered unexpected behavior when using ".join()" to combine a string representation of an integer with a randomly generated string. The result, "5wlfgALGbXOahekxSs9wlfgALGbXOahekxSs5", may seem puzzling.

To understand why this occurred, we need to delve into the mechanics of ".join()". This method operates on lists of strings, not individual strings. When it encounters a non-string input, such as an integer, it automatically converts it to a string representation. In your case, the integer 595 was converted to the string "595".

However, instead of inserting the entire "595" string between the random characters, ".join()" treated it as a list of individual characters: ["5", "9", "5"]. This behavior is evident in the output, where the highlighted characters "5", "9", "5" show that each character was inserted between the random letters.

To achieve the desired concatenation of the integer and the random string, you should use the " " operator instead. " ", unlike ".join()", directly combines two strings by placing them one after the other, without any separators.

By replacing ".join()" with " " in your code:

print(array.array('c', random.sample(string.ascii_letters, 20 - len(strid)))
.tostring() + strid)

You will obtain the expected output, where the integer 595 is appended to the end of the random string.

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