How to get all subsets of a set? (powerset)

Question

Given a set

{0, 1, 2, 3}

How can I produce the subsets:

[set(),
 {0},
 {1},
 {2},
 {3},
 {0, 1},
 {0, 2},
 {0, 3},
 {1, 2}         


        

Answer 1

I just wanted to provide the most comprehensible solution, the anti code-golf version.

from itertools import combinations

l = ["x", "y", "z", ]

def powerset(items):
    combo = []
    for r in range(len(items) + 1):
        #use a list to coerce a actual list from the combinations generator
        combo.append(list(combinations(items,r)))
    return combo

l_powerset = powerset(l)

for i, item in enumerate(l_powerset):
    print "All sets of length ", i
    print item

---

The results

All sets of length 0

[()]

All sets of length 1

[('x',), ('y',), ('z',)]

All sets of length 2

[('x', 'y'), ('x', 'z'), ('y', 'z')]

All sets of length 3

[('x', 'y', 'z')]

For more see the itertools docs, also the wikipedia entry on power sets