Building a list of possible sentences with variable words in Python?

Question

I want to get a list of all sentence possibilities by combining sentence a list of possible sentence structures with possible variables.

sentenceStructures = [
  "What [x] is [y]",
  "What [y] is [x]"
]

variables = {
  "[x]": ["a", "b", "c"],
  "[y]":["q", "r", "s"]
}

The final answer should be

allPossibleSentences = [
  "What a is q",
  "What b is q",
  "What c is q",
  "What a is r",
  "What b is r",
  "What c is r",
  "What a is s",
  "What b is s",
  "What c is s",
  "What q is a",
  "What r is a",
  "What s is a",
  "What q is b",
  "What r is b",
  "What s is b",
  "What q is c",
  "What r is c",
  "What s is c"
]

I figure I should use recursion to get a list of all possibilities.

allPossibleSentences = []

def fillVariable(sentence):
    sentence.find("[")
    #this is where i'm stuck, i'm not sure how to start the recursion
    allPossibleSentences.append(possibility)

for sentence in sentenceStructures:
    fillVariables(sentence)

Any help or pointers appreciated?

Answer 1

You can use nested for loop. You don't need recursion. Something along the line of

sentenceStructures = [
  "What [x] is [y]",
  "What [y] is [x]"
]

variables = {
  "[x]": ["a", "b", "c"],
  "[y]":["q", "r", "s"]
}

x = variables["[x]"]
y = variables["[y]"]

answer = []

for sentence in sentenceStructures:
    for x_item in x:
        for y_item in y:
            s = sentence.replace("[x]", x_item).replace("[y]", y_item)
            answer.append(s)

print(answer)