How can I generate a list of all possible permutations of several letters? [duplicate]

Question

This question already has answers here:

How do I generate all permutations of a list? (40 answers)

Randomize a string input into all possibilities (2 answers)

Closed 8 years ago.

So I am making a word generator that takes several inputted letters, puts them in all possible positions, and matches them with a document to find words. If I am approaching this wrong please tell me! If not how can I do this? Thanks

Answer 1

to generate all permutations of a given list of letters, use the itertools module.

import itertools 
for word in itertools.permutations( list_of_letters ):
   print ''.join(word)

Answer 2

You can write your own function (:

def permutation(head, tail=''):
    if len(head) == 0: 
        print tail
    else:
        for i in range(len(head)):
            permutation(head[0:i] + head[i + 1:], tail + head[i])

Answer 3

It might be faster to run it in reverse: index your document, and for each word, see if it is a subset of your list of letters.

Answer 4

def allpermutationsOfString(words):
  if len(words) == 1:
    return [words]
  result = []
  for index, letter in enumerate(words):
    wordWithoutLetter = words[:index] + words[index+1:]
    result = result + [letter + word for word in allpermutationsOfString(wordWithoutLetter)]
  return result

print allpermutationsOfString("watup") #will print all permutations of watup

Here's another way to implement the algorithm.