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

def powerset(lst):
    return reduce(lambda result, x: result + [subset + [x] for subset in result],
                  lst, [[]])

Answer 2

There is a refinement of powerset:

def powerset(seq):
    """
    Returns all the subsets of this set. This is a generator.
    """
    if len(seq) <= 0:
        yield []
    else:
        for item in powerset(seq[1:]):
            yield [seq[0]]+item
            yield item

Answer 3

def get_power_set(s):
  power_set=[[]]
  for elem in s:
    # iterate over the sub sets so far
    for sub_set in power_set:
      # add a new subset consisting of the subset at hand added elem
      power_set=power_set+[list(sub_set)+[elem]]
  return power_set

For example:

get_power_set([1,2,3])

yield

[[], [1], [2], [1, 2], [3], [1, 3], [2, 3], [1, 2, 3]]

Answer 4

The Python itertools page has exactly a powerset recipe for this:

from itertools import chain, combinations

def powerset(iterable):
    "powerset([1,2,3]) --> () (1,) (2,) (3,) (1,2) (1,3) (2,3) (1,2,3)"
    s = list(iterable)
    return chain.from_iterable(combinations(s, r) for r in range(len(s)+1))

Output:

>>> list(powerset("abcd"))
[(), ('a',), ('b',), ('c',), ('d',), ('a', 'b'), ('a', 'c'), ('a', 'd'), ('b', 'c'), ('b', 'd'), ('c', 'd'), ('a', 'b', 'c'), ('a', 'b', 'd'), ('a', 'c', 'd'), ('b', 'c', 'd'), ('a', 'b', 'c', 'd')]

If you don't like that empty tuple at the beginning, you can just change the range statement to range(1, len(s)+1) to avoid a 0-length combination.

Answer 5

Just a quick power set refresher !

Power set of a set X, is simply the set of all subsets of X including the empty set

Example set X = (a,b,c)

Power Set = { { a , b , c } , { a , b } , { a , c } , { b , c } , { a } , { b } , { c } , { } }

Here is another way of finding power set:

def power_set(input):
    # returns a list of all subsets of the list a
    if (len(input) == 0):
        return [[]]
    else:
        main_subset = [ ]
        for small_subset in power_set(input[1:]):
            main_subset += [small_subset]
            main_subset += [[input[0]] + small_subset]
        return main_subset

print(power_set([0,1,2,3]))

full credit to source

Answer 6

Almost all of these answers use list rather than set, which felt like a bit of a cheat to me. So, out of curiosity I tried to do a simple version truly on set and summarize for other "new to Python" folks.

I found there's a couple oddities in dealing with Python's set implementation. The main surprise to me was handling empty sets. This is in contrast to Ruby's Set implementation, where I can simply do Set[Set[]] and get a Set containing one empty Set, so I found it initially a little confusing.

To review, in doing powerset with sets, I encountered two problems:

1. set() takes an iterable, so set(set()) will return set() because the empty set iterable is empty (duh I guess :))
2. to get a set of sets, set({set()}) and set.add(set) won't work because set() isn't hashable

To solve both issues, I made use of frozenset(), which means I don't quite get what I want (type is literally set), but makes use of the overall set interace.

def powerset(original_set):
  # below gives us a set with one empty set in it
  ps = set({frozenset()}) 
  for member in original_set:
    subset = set()
    for m in ps:
      # to be added into subset, needs to be
      # frozenset.union(set) so it's hashable
      subset.add(m.union(set([member]))
    ps = ps.union(subset)
  return ps

Below we get 2² (16) frozensets correctly as output:

In [1]: powerset(set([1,2,3,4]))
Out[2]:
{frozenset(),
 frozenset({3, 4}),
 frozenset({2}),
 frozenset({1, 4}),
 frozenset({3}),
 frozenset({2, 3}),
 frozenset({2, 3, 4}),
 frozenset({1, 2}),
 frozenset({2, 4}),
 frozenset({1}),
 frozenset({1, 2, 4}),
 frozenset({1, 3}),
 frozenset({1, 2, 3}),
 frozenset({4}),
 frozenset({1, 3, 4}),
 frozenset({1, 2, 3, 4})}

As there's no way to have a set of sets in Python, if you want to turn these frozensets into sets, you'll have to map them back into a list (list(map(set, powerset(set([1,2,3,4])))) ) or modify the above.