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

I'm not sure why you would want to do this in the first place. The resulting set for any moderately large values of x and y will be huge, and will grow exponentially as x and/or y get bigger.

Lets say your set of possible characters is the 26 lowercase letters of the alphabet, and you ask your application to generate all permutations where length = 5. Assuming you don't run out of memory you'll get 11,881,376 (i.e. 26 to the power of 5) strings back. Bump that length up to 6, and you'll get 308,915,776 strings back. These numbers get painfully large, very quickly.

Here's a solution I put together in Java. You'll need to provide two runtime arguments (corresponding to x and y). Have fun.

public class GeneratePermutations {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        int lower = Integer.parseInt(args[0]);
        int upper = Integer.parseInt(args[1]);

        if (upper < lower || upper == 0 || lower == 0) {
            System.exit(0);
        }

        for (int length = lower; length <= upper; length++) {
            generate(length, "");
        }
    }

    private static void generate(int length, String partial) {
        if (length <= 0) {
            System.out.println(partial);
        } else {
            for (char c = 'a'; c <= 'z'; c++) {
                generate(length - 1, partial + c);
            }
        }
    }
}

Answer 2

It's better to use backtracking

#include <stdio.h>
#include <string.h>

void swap(char *a, char *b) {
    char temp;
    temp = *a;
    *a = *b;
    *b = temp;
}

void print(char *a, int i, int n) {
    int j;
    if(i == n) {
        printf("%s\n", a);
    } else {
        for(j = i; j <= n; j++) {
            swap(a + i, a + j);
            print(a, i + 1, n);
            swap(a + i, a + j);
        }
    }
}

int main(void) {
    char a[100];
    gets(a);
    print(a, 0, strlen(a) - 1);
    return 0;
}

Answer 3

permute (ABC) -> A.perm(BC) -> A.perm[B.perm(C)] -> A.perm[(*BC), (CB*)] -> [(*ABC), (BAC), (BCA*), (*ACB), (CAB), (CBA*)] To remove duplicates when inserting each alphabet check to see if previous string ends with the same alphabet (why? -exercise)

public static void main(String[] args) {

    for (String str : permStr("ABBB")){
        System.out.println(str);
    }
}

static Vector<String> permStr(String str){

    if (str.length() == 1){
        Vector<String> ret = new Vector<String>();
        ret.add(str);
        return ret;
    }

    char start = str.charAt(0);
    Vector<String> endStrs = permStr(str.substring(1));
    Vector<String> newEndStrs = new Vector<String>();
    for (String endStr : endStrs){
        for (int j = 0; j <= endStr.length(); j++){
            if (endStr.substring(0, j).endsWith(String.valueOf(start)))
                break;
            newEndStrs.add(endStr.substring(0, j) + String.valueOf(start) + endStr.substring(j));
        }
    }
    return newEndStrs;
}

Prints all permutations sans duplicates

Answer 4

This is a translation of Mike's Ruby version, into Common Lisp:

(defun perms (x y original-string)
  (loop with all = (list "")
        with current-array = (list "")
        for iteration from 1 to y
        do (loop with next-array = nil
                 for string in current-array
                 do (loop for c across original-string
                          for value = (concatenate 'string string (string c))
                          do (push value next-array)
                             (push value all))
                    (setf current-array (reverse next-array)))
        finally (return (nreverse (delete-if #'(lambda (el) (< (length el) x)) all)))))

And another version, slightly shorter and using more loop facility features:

(defun perms (x y original-string)
  (loop repeat y
        collect (loop for string in (or (car (last sets)) (list ""))
                      append (loop for c across original-string
                                   collect (concatenate 'string string (string c)))) into sets
        finally (return (loop for set in sets
                              append (loop for el in set when (>= (length el) x) collect el)))))

Answer 5

Ruby answer that works:

class String
  def each_char_with_index
    0.upto(size - 1) do |index|
      yield(self[index..index], index)
    end
  end
  def remove_char_at(index)
    return self[1..-1] if index == 0
    self[0..(index-1)] + self[(index+1)..-1]
  end
end

def permute(str, prefix = '')
  if str.size == 0
    puts prefix
    return
  end
  str.each_char_with_index do |char, index|
    permute(str.remove_char_at(index), prefix + char)
  end
end

# example
# permute("abc")

Answer 6

c# iterative:

public List<string> Permutations(char[] chars)
    {
        List<string> words = new List<string>();
        words.Add(chars[0].ToString());
        for (int i = 1; i < chars.Length; ++i)
        {
            int currLen = words.Count;
            for (int j = 0; j < currLen; ++j)
            {
                var w = words[j];
                for (int k = 0; k <= w.Length; ++k)
                {
                    var nstr = w.Insert(k, chars[i].ToString());
                    if (k == 0)
                        words[j] = nstr;
                    else
                        words.Add(nstr);
                }
            }
        }
        return words;
    }