What is the best way to generate all possible three letter strings?

Question

I am generating all possible three letters keywords e.g. aaa, aab, aac.... zzy, zzz below is my code:

alphabets = ['a', 'b', 'c', 'd', 'e', 'f', 'g', 'h', 'i', 'j', 'k', 'l', 'm', 'n', 'o', 'p', 'q', 'r', 's', 't', 'u', 'v', 'w', 'x', 'y', 'z']

keywords = []
for alpha1 in alphabets:
    for alpha2 in alphabets:
        for alpha3 in alphabets:
            keywords.append(alpha1+alpha2+alpha3)

Can this functionality be achieved in a more sleek and efficient way?

Answer 1

keywords = itertools.product(alphabets, repeat = 3)

See the documentation for itertools.product. If you need a list of strings, just use

keywords = [''.join(i) for i in itertools.product(alphabets, repeat = 3)]

alphabets also doesn't need to be a list, it can just be a string, for example:

from itertools import product
from string import ascii_lowercase
keywords = [''.join(i) for i in product(ascii_lowercase, repeat = 3)]

will work if you just want the lowercase ascii letters.

Answer 2

You could also use map instead of the list comprehension (this is one of the cases where map is still faster than the LC)

>>> from itertools import product
>>> from string import ascii_lowercase
>>> keywords = map(''.join, product(ascii_lowercase, repeat=3))

This variation of the list comprehension is also faster than using ''.join

>>> keywords = [a+b+c for a,b,c in product(ascii_lowercase, repeat=3)]

Answer 3

from itertools import combinations_with_replacement

alphabets = ['a', 'b', 'c', 'd', 'e', 'f', 'g', 'h', 'i', 'j', 'k', 'l', 'm', 'n', 'o', 'p', 'q', 'r', 's', 't', 'u', 'v', 'w', 'x', 'y', 'z']

for (a,b,c) in combinations_with_replacement(alphabets, 3):
    print a+b+c

Answer 4

You can also do this without any external modules by doing simple calculation.
The PermutationIterator is what you are searching for.

def permutation_atindex(_int, _set, length):
    """
    Return the permutation at index '_int' for itemgetter '_set'
    with length 'length'.
    """
    items = []
    strLength = len(_set)
    index = _int % strLength
    items.append(_set[index])

    for n in xrange(1,length, 1):
        _int //= strLength
        index = _int % strLength
        items.append(_set[index])

    return items

class PermutationIterator:
    """
    A class that can iterate over possible permuations
    of the given 'iterable' and 'length' argument.
    """

    def __init__(self, iterable, length):
        self.length = length
        self.current = 0
        self.max = len(iterable) ** length
        self.iterable = iterable

    def __iter__(self):
        return self

    def __next__(self):
        if self.current >= self.max:
            raise StopIteration

        try:
            return permutation_atindex(self.current, self.iterable, self.length)
        finally:
            self.current   += 1

Give it an iterable object and an integer as the output-length.

from string import ascii_lowercase

for e in PermutationIterator(ascii_lowercase, 3):
    print "".join(e)

This will start from 'aaa' and end with 'zzz'.

Answer 5

chars = range(ord('a'), ord('z')+1);
print [chr(a) + chr(b) +chr(c) for a in chars for b in chars for c in chars]

Answer 6

We could solve this without the itertools by utilizing two function definitions:

def combos(alphas, k):
    l = len(alphas)
    kRecur(alphas, "", l, k)

def KRecur(alphas, prfx, l, k):
    if k==0:
        print(prfx)
    else:
        for i in range(l):
            newPrfx = prfx + alphas[i]
            KRecur(alphas, newPrfx, l, k-1)

It's done using two functions to avoid resetting the length of the alphas, and the second function self-iterates itself until it reaches a k of 0 to return the k-mer for that i loop.

Adopted from a solution by Abhinav Ramana on Geeks4Geeks

Answer 7

Well, i came up with that solution while thinking about how to cover that topic:

import random

s = "aei"
b = []
lenght=len(s)
for _ in range(10):
    for _ in range(length):
        password = ("".join(random.sample(s,length)))
        if password not in b:
            b.append("".join(password))
print(b)
print(len(b))

Please let me describe what is going on inside:

1. Importing Random,
2. creating a string with letters that we want to use
3. creating an empty list that we will use to put our combinations in
4. and now we are using range (I put 10 but for 3 digits it can be less)
5. next using random.sample with a list and list length we are creating letter combinations and joining it.
6. in next steps we are checking if in our b list we have that combination - if so, it is not added to the b list. If current combination is not on the list, we are adding it to it. (we are comparing final joined combination).
7. the last step is to print list b with all combinations and print number of possible combinations. Maybe it is not clear and most efficient code but i think it works...

Answer 8

print([a+b+c for a in alphabets for b in alphabets for c in alphabets if a !=b and b!=c and c!= a])

This removes the repetition of characters in one string