'producing all the anagrams from a string python

I was thinking about this problem today, and I came with the following pseudocode (Python 3.2) :

def anagrams( string ):

    for c in string:
      anagram = c + anagram( string - {c} ) # remove the char from its position in the string
      print(anagram)

    return

def main():

    word = "abcd"
    anagrams( word )

    return

However, I'd like to know a pythonic way to do this operation: anagram = c + anagram( string - {c} )

How could I remove that char from the string? so for example:

"abc" -> 'a' + "bc" -> 'a' + 'b' + "c" -> 'a' + 'b' + 'c' = 'abc'
             + "cb" -> 'a' + 'c' + "b" -> 'a' + 'c' + 'b' = 'acb'
      -> 'b' + "ac" -> 'b' + 'a' + "c" -> 'b' + 'a' + 'c' = 'bac'
             + "ca" -> 'b' + 'c' + "a" -> 'b' + 'c' + 'a' = 'bca'
      -> 'c' + "ba" -> 'c' + 'b' + "a" -> 'c' + 'b' + 'a' = 'cba'
             + "ab" -> 'c' + 'a' + "b" -> 'c' + 'a' + 'b' = 'cab'

Thanks

python

Solution 1:^[1]

Use the itertools module.

import itertools
perms = [''.join(perm) for perm in itertools.permutations('abc')]

Solution 2:^[2]

Just to note, @sloth's answer gives a slightly unexpected result if the string contains more than one instance of a letter - duplicate permutations:

["".join(perm) for perm in itertools.permutations('aabc')]

Results in:

['aabc',
 'aacb',
 'abac',
 'abca',
 'acab',
 'acba',
 'aabc',
 'aacb',
 'abac',
 'abca',
 'acab',
 'acba',
 'baac',
 'baca',
 'baac',
 'baca',
 'bcaa',
 'bcaa',
 'caab',
 'caba',
 'caab',
 'caba',
 'cbaa',
 'cbaa']

If this isn't the desired result, using 'set' will eliminate the dups. Although if you want a list, you'll need to relist (also 'set' doesn't maintain order so use 'sorted'):

sorted(set(["".join(perm) for perm in itertools.permutations("aabc")]))

Results in:

['aabc',
 'aacb',
 'abac',
 'abca',
 'acab',
 'acba',
 'baac',
 'baca',
 'bcaa',
 'caab',
 'caba',
 'cbaa']

Solution 3:^[3]

You can cast the word to a list, run remove and then use join to get it back together again.

word = 'abca'
letters = list(word)
letters.remove('a')  # Only deletes the first 'a'
word = ''.join(letters)

Solution 4:^[4]

Here's some of the suggestions wrapped up to make a new script, called anagram

$ anagram hit
hit
hti
iht
ith
thi
tih

anagram

#!/usr/bin/env python3
import argparse
import itertools
import sys

parser = argparse.ArgumentParser()
parser.add_argument("word", help="A word to generate anagrams for.")
args = parser.parse_args()

perms = [''.join(perm) for perm in itertools.permutations(args.word)]
for perm in perms:
    print(perm)

Sources

This article follows the attribution requirements of Stack Overflow and is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Source: Stack Overflow

Solution	Source
Solution 1
Solution 2	deepstructure
Solution 3	mjgpy3
Solution 4	Brad Parks

'producing all the anagrams from a string python

Solution 1:[1]

Solution 2:[2]

Solution 3:[3]

Solution 4:[4]