Generating all permutations of a given string

Question

What is an elegant way to find all the permutations of a string. E.g. permutation for ba, would be ba and ab, but what about longer st

Answer 1

Of all the solutions given here and in other forums, I liked Mark Byers the most. That description actually made me think and code it myself. Too bad I cannot voteup his solution as I am newbie.
Anyways here is my implementation of his description

public class PermTest {

    public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
        String str = "abcdef";
        StringBuffer strBuf = new StringBuffer(str);
        doPerm(strBuf,0);
    }

    private static void doPerm(StringBuffer str, int index){

        if(index == str.length())
            System.out.println(str);            
        else { //recursively solve this by placing all other chars at current first pos
            doPerm(str, index+1);
            for (int i = index+1; i < str.length(); i++) {//start swapping all other chars with current first char
                swap(str,index, i);
                doPerm(str, index+1);
                swap(str,i, index);//restore back my string buffer
            }
        }
    }

    private  static void swap(StringBuffer str, int pos1, int pos2){
        char t1 = str.charAt(pos1);
        str.setCharAt(pos1, str.charAt(pos2));
        str.setCharAt(pos2, t1);
    }
}   

I prefer this solution ahead of the first one in this thread because this solution uses StringBuffer. I wouldn't say my solution doesn't create any temporary string (it actually does in system.out.println where the toString() of StringBuffer is called). But I just feel this is better than the first solution where too many string literals are created. May be some performance guy out there can evalute this in terms of 'memory' (for 'time' it already lags due to that extra 'swap')