Permutations in JavaScript?

Question

I\'m trying to write a function that does the following:

• takes an array of integers as an argument (e.g. [1,2,3,4])
• creates an array of all the possib

Answer 1

Most answers to this question use expensive operations like continuous insertions and deletions of items in an array, or copying arrays reiteratively.

Instead, this is the typical backtracking solution:

function permute(arr) {
  var results = [],
      l = arr.length,
      used = Array(l), // Array of bools. Keeps track of used items
      data = Array(l); // Stores items of the current permutation
  (function backtracking(pos) {
    if(pos == l) return results.push(data.slice());
    for(var i=0; i

permute([1,2,3,4]); // [  [1,2,3,4], [1,2,4,3], /* ... , */ [4,3,2,1]  ]

Since the results array will be huge, it might be a good idea to iterate the results one by one instead of allocating all the data simultaneously. In ES6, this can be done with generators:

function permute(arr) {
  var l = arr.length,
      used = Array(l),
      data = Array(l);
  return function* backtracking(pos) {
    if(pos == l) yield data.slice();
    else for(var i=0; i

var p = permute([1,2,3,4]);
p.next(); // {value: [1,2,3,4], done: false}
p.next(); // {value: [1,2,4,3], done: false}
// ...
p.next(); // {value: [4,3,2,1], done: false}
p.next(); // {value: undefined, done: true}