On Wed, 2005-07-13 at 11:09 -0400, rbt wrote:
> 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
>
Someone pointed out off-list that this is doing permutation, not
combination. Is there a way to make random.sample to do combinations?
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