Getting all possible combinations of list items

[Tim Peters]

[Greg Krohn]
> ...
> scratching my head over 'magic' code,

Generators in 2.2 are "the natural" way to do this kind of thing.  Here from
test_generators.py:

>>> def gcomb(x, k):
...     "Generate all combinations of k elements from list x."
...
...     if k > len(x):
...         return
...     if k == 0:
...         yield []
...     else:
...         first, rest = x[0], x[1:]
...         # A combination does or doesn't contain first.
...         # If it does, the remainder is a k-1 comb of rest.
...         for c in gcomb(rest, k-1):
...             c.insert(0, first)
...             yield c
...         # If it doesn't contain first, it's a k comb of rest.
...         for c in gcomb(rest, k):
...             yield c

>>> seq = range(1, 5)
>>> for k in range(len(seq) + 2):
...     print "%d-combs of %s:" % (k, seq)
...     for c in gcomb(seq, k):
...         print "   ", c
0-combs of [1, 2, 3, 4]:
    []
1-combs of [1, 2, 3, 4]:
    [1]
    [2]
    [3]
    [4]
2-combs of [1, 2, 3, 4]:
    [1, 2]
    [1, 3]
    [1, 4]
    [2, 3]
    [2, 4]
    [3, 4]
3-combs of [1, 2, 3, 4]:
    [1, 2, 3]
    [1, 2, 4]
    [1, 3, 4]
    [2, 3, 4]
4-combs of [1, 2, 3, 4]:
    [1, 2, 3, 4]
5-combs of [1, 2, 3, 4]:

That was posted to c.l.py before.  Go to a search engine and look for it,
and you'll find an equivalent recursive (non-generator) routine too, which
looks *almost* exactly the same.

no-need-for-magic-just-need-care-at-the-boundaries-ly y'rs  - tim