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

A simple way would be to harness the internal representation of integers under 2's complement arithmetic.

Binary representation of integers is as {000, 001, 010, 011, 100, 101, 110, 111} for numbers ranging from 0 to 7. For an integer counter value, considering 1 as inclusion of corresponding element in collection and '0' as exclusion we can generate subsets based on the counting sequence. Numbers have to be generated from 0 to pow(2,n) -1 where n is the length of array i.e. number of bits in binary representation.

A simple Subset Generator Function based on it can be written as below. It basically relies

def subsets(array):
    if not array:
        return
    else:
        length = len(array)
        for max_int in range(0x1 << length):
            subset = []
            for i in range(length):
                if max_int & (0x1 << i):
                    subset.append(array[i])
            yield subset

and then it can be used as

def get_subsets(array):
    powerset = []
    for i in subsets(array):
        powerser.append(i)
    return powerset

Testing

Adding following in local file

if __name__ == '__main__':
    sample = ['b',  'd',  'f']

    for i in range(len(sample)):
        print "Subsets for " , sample[i:], " are ", get_subsets(sample[i:])

gives following output

Subsets for  ['b', 'd', 'f']  are  [[], ['b'], ['d'], ['b', 'd'], ['f'], ['b', 'f'], ['d', 'f'], ['b', 'd', 'f']]
Subsets for  ['d', 'f']  are  [[], ['d'], ['f'], ['d', 'f']]
Subsets for  ['f']  are  [[], ['f']]