Password Generator Without Special Characters

Some banks, legacy portals and hardware keypads still reject punctuation. This generator produces letters-and-digits-only passwords and shows the entropy, so you can add back with length what the missing symbols cost you.

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When you need a password without symbols

Some systems still refuse symbols. Legacy banking portals, older enterprise directories, embedded device firmware, a few point-of-sale terminals and plenty of internal tools built a decade ago will reject a password containing punctuation, sometimes with an unhelpful error and sometimes by silently stripping the characters.

That last behaviour is the dangerous one. A system that quietly removes symbols stores something different from what you typed, and you find out when you cannot log back in. Generating an alphanumeric password from the start avoids the whole category of problem.

There are also places where symbols work but cause friction: passwords typed on a games console, dictated over the phone, or entered on a foreign keyboard layout where punctuation sits somewhere unexpected.

What it costs you, precisely

Removing symbols shrinks the alphabet from 88 characters to 62, which is a loss of about half a bit per character. At 16 characters that is 103 bits against 95 — both far beyond any practical offline attack.

In other words the cost is real but small, and it is easily recovered. Adding two characters more than makes up the difference: an 18-character alphanumeric password is about 107 bits, above where you started.

This is the general shape of password arithmetic. Composition rules move the number a little; length moves it a lot. Any time a system forces you to drop a character class, the right response is to add length rather than to worry.

  • 16 characters with symbols: about 103 bits
  • 16 characters alphanumeric: about 95 bits
  • 18 characters alphanumeric: about 107 bits — the loss is recovered and then some

How the passwords are generated

Every character comes from crypto.getRandomValues, the browser's cryptographically secure random number generator. Nothing here uses Math.random, which is seeded from the clock and produces sequences an attacker can reproduce — fine for shuffling a playlist, useless for a secret.

Picking a character from the alphabet uses rejection sampling rather than a modulo. Writing randomValue % alphabetLength is the obvious approach and it is subtly biased: because 2^32 is not divisible by most alphabet sizes, the first few characters of the set come up slightly more often than the rest. The bias is small, but it is a real reduction in the search space an attacker has to cover, so the generator discards values that would land in the uneven tail and draws again.

Generation happens entirely in your browser. No password is sent to a server, logged, or stored — there is nothing to breach, because nothing leaves the page. Closing the tab is all it takes to destroy every password you generated.

Where to put the password once you have it

A generated password is only useful if you can retrieve it. The honest answer for most people is a password manager — it removes the need to remember anything except one master credential, and it fills passwords only on the domain they belong to, which quietly defeats most phishing.

If you are not going to use one, write the password down and keep the paper somewhere physical and private. A note in a drawer is a better outcome than a memorable password reused across accounts, because the realistic threat to your accounts is a credential-stuffing bot working through a leaked database, not a burglar reading your desk.

  • Never reuse a password across sites — one breach then unlocks everything
  • Turn on two-factor authentication where it is offered; it protects you even if the password does leak
  • Change a password when a service discloses a breach, not on a fixed schedule — forced rotation pushes people toward predictable patterns
  • Treat security questions as passwords too, and generate answers rather than using real ones

Frequently Asked Questions

Is a password without special characters still secure?

Yes. Dropping symbols takes the alphabet from 88 characters to 62, costing about half a bit per character — 16 characters gives about 95 bits instead of 103. Both are far beyond any practical offline attack, and adding two characters more than recovers the difference.

Why do some websites not allow symbols?

Usually legacy code: older systems that escape input poorly, embedded firmware with limited character handling, or validation rules written years ago and never revisited. It is generally a sign of an older codebase rather than a deliberate security decision.

What if a site silently removes my symbols?

This is the worst case, because the stored password differs from what you typed and you discover it when you cannot log in. Generating alphanumeric from the start avoids it entirely, which is the main reason this page exists.

How long should an alphanumeric password be?

Sixteen as a floor, eighteen or twenty if the system permits. Length is how you compensate for the smaller alphabet, and it costs nothing when a password manager does the typing.

Does this include uppercase and numbers?

Yes. Alphanumeric here means uppercase A-Z, lowercase a-z and digits 0-9 — a 62-character alphabet. Only punctuation and symbols are excluded. You can narrow it further with the switches if a system is more restrictive still.

Can I also exclude confusing characters?

Yes, using the ambiguous-characters switch, which removes l, 1, I, O and 0. It costs a little more entropy and is worth it for any password that will be read off a screen or printed and typed back by hand.

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