Generate list of all possible permutations of a string

Question

How would I go about generating a list of all possible permutations of a string between x and y characters in length, containing a variable list of characters.

Any l

Answer 1

You are going to get a lot of strings, that's for sure...

Where x and y is how you define them and r is the number of characters we are selecting from --if I am understanding you correctly. You should definitely generate these as needed and not get sloppy and say, generate a powerset and then filter the length of strings.

The following definitely isn't the best way to generate these, but it's an interesting aside, none-the-less.

Knuth (volume 4, fascicle 2, 7.2.1.3) tells us that (s,t)-combination is equivalent to s+1 things taken t at a time with repetition -- an (s,t)-combination is notation used by Knuth that is equal to . We can figure this out by first generating each (s,t)-combination in binary form (so, of length (s+t)) and counting the number of 0's to the left of each 1.

10001000011101 --> becomes the permutation: {0, 3, 4, 4, 4, 1}

Answer 2

Non recursive solution according to Knuth, Python example:

def nextPermutation(perm):
    k0 = None
    for i in range(len(perm)-1):
        if perm[i]<perm[i+1]:
            k0=i
    if k0 == None:
        return None

    l0 = k0+1
    for i in range(k0+1, len(perm)):
        if perm[k0] < perm[i]:
            l0 = i

    perm[k0], perm[l0] = perm[l0], perm[k0]
    perm[k0+1:] = reversed(perm[k0+1:])
    return perm

perm=list("12345")
while perm:
    print perm
    perm = nextPermutation(perm)

Answer 3

You might look at "Efficiently Enumerating the Subsets of a Set", which describes an algorithm to do part of what you want - quickly generate all subsets of N characters from length x to y. It contains an implementation in C.

For each subset, you'd still have to generate all the permutations. For instance if you wanted 3 characters from "abcde", this algorithm would give you "abc","abd", "abe"... but you'd have to permute each one to get "acb", "bac", "bca", etc.

Answer 4

Recursive solution in C++

int main (int argc, char * const argv[]) {
        string s = "sarp";
        bool used [4];
        permute(0, "", used, s);
}

void permute(int level, string permuted, bool used [], string &original) {
    int length = original.length();

    if(level == length) { // permutation complete, display
        cout << permuted << endl;
    } else {
        for(int i=0; i<length; i++) { // try to add an unused character
            if(!used[i]) {
                used[i] = true;
                permute(level+1, original[i] + permuted, used, original); // find the permutations starting with this string
                used[i] = false;
            }
        }
}

Answer 5

There are a lot of good answers here. I also suggest a very simple recursive solution in C++.

#include <string>
#include <iostream>

template<typename Consume>
void permutations(std::string s, Consume consume, std::size_t start = 0) {
    if (start == s.length()) consume(s);
    for (std::size_t i = start; i < s.length(); i++) {
        std::swap(s[start], s[i]);
        permutations(s, consume, start + 1);
    }
}

int main(void) {
    std::string s = "abcd";
    permutations(s, [](std::string s) {
        std::cout << s << std::endl;
    });
}

Note: strings with repeated characters will not produce unique permutations.

Answer 6

The following Java recursion prints all permutations of a given string:

//call it as permut("",str);

public void permut(String str1,String str2){
    if(str2.length() != 0){
        char ch = str2.charAt(0);
        for(int i = 0; i <= str1.length();i++)
            permut(str1.substring(0,i) + ch + str1.substring(i,str1.length()),
                     str2.substring(1,str2.length()));
    }else{
    System.out.println(str1);
    }
}

Following is the updated version of above "permut" method which makes n! (n factorial) less recursive calls compared to the above method

//call it as permut("",str);

public void permut(String str1,String str2){
   if(str2.length() > 1){
       char ch = str2.charAt(0);
       for(int i = 0; i <= str1.length();i++)
          permut(str1.substring(0,i) + ch + str1.substring(i,str1.length()),
                 str2.substring(1,str2.length()));
   }else{
    char ch = str2.charAt(0);
    for(int i = 0; i <= str1.length();i++)
        System.out.println(str1.substring(0,i) + ch +    str1.substring(i,str1.length()),
                 str2.substring(1,str2.length()));
   }
}