Every permutation of the alphabet up to 29 characters?

Question

I\'m attempting to write a program that will generate a text file with every possible permutation of the alphabet from one character up to twenty-nine characters. I\'ve chosen 2

Answer 1

function p($length, $partial)
{
      if ($length == 0) return $partial;
      $ans = array();
      foreach (range('a', 'z') as $i)
      {
          $ans[] = p($length -1, $partial . $i);
      }
      return $ans;  
}

$top = 3;
//$f = fopen('out.txt');
for ($l = 1; $l < $top+1; $l++)
{
     print_r(p($l), '');
     //fwrite($p($l), '');
}

If you want to set $top to 29 and give it a try go ahead. I'm not going to.

EDIT - print_r(p($l), ''); ---> print_r(p($l, ''));

PHP keeps impressing me with its tolerance for mistakes. Missing a 'required' argument to my p? no problem itll just be empty string somehow (or zero, or false, situation depending). Second '' argument to print_r? no difference, gets treated like the default false anyway

EDIT

I don't know what the hell I was doing here. The different return types of p are quite odd, and will return a compound array with a weird structure.

This is a far better solution anyway

$lengthDesired = 29;
for($i='a'; $i != str_pad('',$lengthDesired+1,'a'); $i++)
    echo $i .', ';