Added printable type (random printable ascii chars)

[ZeroBug-ZB]

No description provided.

[sindresorhus]

What does “printable characters” refer to exactly? And what’s the use-case?

[ZeroBug-ZB]

Printable chars are characters that can be displayed, you can read more here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII#ASCII_printable_characters

They are used during the generation of a random password (password recovery for example), where it is necessary to generate and email a password with printable characters.

When generating a password it is good practice to use all possible characters and not restrict to "a-zA-Z0-9!$%&@#", since it is saved (and compared) as a hash it is not necessary to filter the chars to be "safe".

[sindresorhus]

Should be asciiPrintable then? Printable character in general could be any character that is not invisible, including emoji.

You also need to update the readme and the TypeScript definition.

[sindresorhus]

@stroncium Thoughts on this?

[stroncium]

+1 on ascii-printable instead of printable

-1 on general idea:

• when integrating with random libraries/checkers out there, it can easily hit limits on some(not so well thought of) checker
• printable set is 1.5 times bigger than base64 set, not much of a difference in the end, but base64 is more readable and already is there.
• if we speak about entropy strings which might be shared via various mediums(like passwords), it is considered a bad idea to generate strings of random printable characters, as some of them can be confusing/indistinguishable when wrote down on paper/spelled out

So, if we were to introduce something to generate full random passwords, we might just go for it and make a good generator, not the most primitive thing.

@ZeroBug-ZB
Also, it's kind of abstract critics, but I'm so damn tired of the way people handle password all around I owe myself to speak out: random character strings are bad passwords. Easy explanation: https://xkcd.com/936/
Shameless advertising: https://github.com/stroncium/node-xkcdpass (but there is a couple more of implementations for js, as far as I recall)

[sindresorhus]

@ZeroBug-ZB Can you rename it to ascii-printable? And also update the readme and the TypeScript definition.

@stroncium I agree with you. I still think this mode could be useful for other things though. After merging this PR, maybe you could submit a PR to recommend https://github.com/stroncium/node-xkcdpass for generating passwords.

[sindresorhus]

@ZeroBug-ZB Bump

[sindresorhus]

#20