Script to generate random string

Anyone have a script to generate a random string that is X amount to characters long? Of course the idea being to be able to specify the number of characters generated.

I made a random key generator to randomly search the database for textures. So far, after about 400 keys, none have produced an actual texture (other than "Missing Image". Anyway, the basic concept follows:

Create a list of characters, ["a", "b", "c", etc...];
Create a function that appends a random string from the list to a string variable.
Loop the function as often as needed, adding to the string each new character.

list chars = ["a", "b", "c", "d", "e", "f", "g", "h", "i"]; //surely a better way than this
string output = "";

integer length = 1;

default {
     integer x;
     for(x=0;x<length;x++) {
          float y = llFrand(llGetListLength(chars)) - 0.1;
          output = output + llList2String(chars, (integer)y);
     }
     llSay(0, output);
}

one way that *might* be better would be to use a string rather than a list.

string chars = "abcdefghi";

anyone know?

You'd have thought using a string would be faster - a list of 26 elements isn't hugely slow but you'd still expect it to be slower than extracting a substring from a string of equal length. If you're doing randoms with lower and upper case, digits, symbols etc. then the string gets relatively faster with each extra character you add as I understand it.

Neat. However, the output is creating a pyramid like this when I set the length to 10:

Object whispers: 1
Object whispers: 1o
Object whispers: 1o8
Object whispers: 1o8g
Object whispers: 1o8gx
Object whispers: 1o8gx6
Object whispers: 1o8gx6s
Object whispers: 1o8gx6s5
Object whispers: 1o8gx6s5h
Object whispers: 1o8gx6s5h0

Can we somehow just get the last ouput string 1o8gx6s5h0 ?