Listing all permutations of a string/integer

Question

A common task in programming interviews (not from my experience of interviews though) is to take a string or an integer and list every possible permutation.

Is there

Answer 1

Here's my solution in JavaScript (NodeJS). The main idea is that we take one element at a time, "remove it" from the string, vary the rest of the characters, and insert the element at the front.

function perms (string) {
  if (string.length == 0) {
    return [];
  }
  if (string.length == 1) {
    return [string];
  }
  var list = [];
  for(var i = 0; i < string.length; i++) {
    var invariant = string[i];
    var rest = string.substr(0, i) + string.substr(i + 1);
    var newPerms = perms(rest);
    for (var j = 0; j < newPerms.length; j++) {
      list.push(invariant + newPerms[j]);
    }
  }
  return list;
}

module.exports = perms;

And here are the tests:

require('should');
var permutations = require('../src/perms');

describe('permutations', function () {
  it('should permute ""', function () {
    permutations('').should.eql([]);
  })

  it('should permute "1"', function () {
    permutations('1').should.eql(['1']);
  })

  it('should permute "12"', function () {
    permutations('12').should.eql(['12', '21']);
  })

  it('should permute "123"', function () {
    var expected = ['123', '132', '321', '213', '231', '312'];
    var actual = permutations('123');
    expected.forEach(function (e) {
      actual.should.containEql(e);
    })
  })

  it('should permute "1234"', function () {
    // Wolfram Alpha FTW!
    var expected = ['1234', '1243', '1324', '1342', '1423', '1432', '2134', '2143', '2314', '2341', '2413', '2431', '3124', '3142', '3214', '3241', '3412', '3421', '4123', '4132'];
    var actual = permutations('1234');
    expected.forEach(function (e) {
      actual.should.containEql(e);
    })
  })
})