Problem
You want to generate a random password for a user. For example they may have forgotten their current password and have requested a new one.
Solution
This is a simple example of some code that will generate a random password, 3 characters long from the letters A to Z.
Detailed explanation
The Chr() function in ColdFusion converts a number to the equivalent ASCII character. You can see a list of characters and the corresponding entity number on the w3schools website: http://www.w3schools.com/tags/ref_ascii.asp
This example generates a password, which is 3 characters long using upper case letters. You can however use uppercase, lowercase and numbers if you wish.
The entity number for a capital "A" is 65, and the entity number for a capital "Z" is 90. We can use the RandRange function to pick a random number between 65 and 90, and then convert that to a letter.
<cfscript> newpassword = Chr(RandRange(65,90)) & Chr(RandRange(65,90)) & Chr(RandRange(65,90)); </cfscript>
For longer passwords, you'd really want to use a loop instead of building the new password all in one line of code.
If you want more sophisticated ways to generate passwords then I recommend that you look at two functions on cflib.org.
http://www.cflib.org/udf/MakePassword
http://www.cflib.org/udf/generatePassword
Further documentation for the Chr() and RandRange() functions is available on the Adobe site:
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license, pertaining to the examples of code included within this work are available at Adobe.
