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

Well here is an elegant, non-recursive, O(n!) solution:

public static StringBuilder[] permutations(String s) {
        if (s.length() == 0)
            return null;
        int length = fact(s.length());
        StringBuilder[] sb = new StringBuilder[length];
        for (int i = 0; i < length; i++) {
            sb[i] = new StringBuilder();
        }
        for (int i = 0; i < s.length(); i++) {
            char ch = s.charAt(i);
            int times = length / (i + 1);
            for (int j = 0; j < times; j++) {
                for (int k = 0; k < length / times; k++) {
                    sb[j * length / times + k].insert(k, ch);
                }
            }
        }
        return sb;
    }