all possible combinations
rbt
rbt at athop1.ath.vt.edu
Wed Jul 13 11:09:25 EDT 2005
On Wed, 2005-07-13 at 10:21 -0400, rbt wrote:
> Say I have a list that has 3 letters in it:
>
> ['a', 'b', 'c']
>
> I want to print all the possible 4 digit combinations of those 3
> letters:
>
> 4^3 = 64
>
> aaaa
> abaa
> aaba
> aaab
> acaa
> aaca
> aaac
> ...
>
> What is the most efficient way to do this?
Expanding this to 4^4 (256) to test the random.sample function produces
interesting results. It never finds more than 24 combinations out of the
possible 256. This leads to the question... how 'random' is sample ;)
Try it for yourselves:
test = list('1234')
combinations = []
while 1:
combo = random.sample(test, 4)
possibility = ''.join(combo)
if possibility not in combinations:
print possibility
combinations.append(possibility)
continue
else:
continue
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