permutations with unique values

Question

itertools.permutations generates where its elements are treated as unique based on their position, not on their value. So basically I want to avoid duplicates like this:

Answer 1

This is my attempt without resorting to set / dict, as a generator using recursion, but using string as input. Output is also ordered in natural order:

def perm_helper(head: str, tail: str):
    if len(tail) == 0:
        yield head
    else:
        last_c = None
        for index, c in enumerate(tail):
            if last_c != c:
                last_c = c
                yield from perm_helper(
                    head + c, tail[:index] + tail[index + 1:]
                )


def perm_generator(word):
    yield from perm_helper("", sorted(word))

example:

from itertools import takewhile
word = "POOL"
list(takewhile(lambda w: w != word, (x for x in perm_generator(word))))
# output
# ['LOOP', 'LOPO', 'LPOO', 'OLOP', 'OLPO', 'OOLP', 'OOPL', 'OPLO', 'OPOL', 'PLOO', 'POLO']