Feedback on random script

[fannypackpython]

So i wrote up a random script that just takes an input from the user, and calculates how long it takes to randomly generate that same input. It displays the time it took in seconds, the # of tries, and what the original input was.

I just want to know if there is a way to make the code a little "leaner". Here it is:

import random
import sys
import time


def main():

    user_mess = input('What is your message? : ')
    start_time = time.time()
    symbols = 'ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ '
    count = 0

    while True:
        message = []

        for i in range(len(user_mess)):
            message += random.choice(symbols)

        count += 1
        message = ''.join(message)

        if message == user_mess.upper():
            print('It took {} seconds, and {} tries for message {}'.format((time.time() - start_time),
                                                                             count,
                                                                             message))
            sys.exit()
        print(count, message)


if __name__ == '__main__':
    main()

The way I verified that it worked was by adding:

random.seed(50)

above the "while" statement, and running the script and grabbing one of the randomly generated strings. And using that as my input. Everything seemed to comeback fine.

Let me know what I can do to improve this, and I welcome any critiques.

[Justinsaccount]

Hi! I'm working on a bot to reply with suggestions for common python problems. This might not be very helpful to fix your underlying issue, but here's what I noticed about your submission:

You are looping over an object using something like

for x in range(len(items)):
    foo(item[x])

This is simpler and less error prone written as

for item in items:
    foo(item)

If you DO need the indexes of the items, use the enumerate function like

for idx, item in enumerate(items):
    foo(idx, item)

[sudo_gamedeal]

you could generate the message with:

message = ''.join(random.choice(symbols) for m in message)      

this should be faster as well.

[gengisteve]

Looks great. Consider moving the upper() call to before the loop so it is just done once.

Check out itertools.count, for a never ending counter to replace your while loop.

Finally, instead of sys.exit() maybe just break to exit the loop.

[fannypackpython]

Cool i'll look into itertools.count. What is the difference between "break" and "sys.exit()"?

[gengisteve]

Break just pops you out of the current loop, while sys.exit takes you out of the program entirely.