get all possible combinations of a list’s elements in python

April 16th, 2008 by Lawrence David

let’s say you’ve got a list of the numbers 0 through 4 and you wanted all 32 possible combinations of them. to get that list:

list_of_five = range(0,5)

swap_list_list = [[]]

for swap in list_of_five:

temp_lists = []

for list_stub in swap_list_list:

this_list = copy.copy(list_stub)

this_list.append(swap)

temp_lists.append(this_list)

temp_lists.append(list_stub)

swap_list_list = temp_lists

print swap_list_list

check out the other tips and tricks i've compiled on these pages. you might learn something else interesting!

on 21 Dec 2008 at 12:31 am shady

After doing “import copy” to your code, I get this output.

$ python combo.py
[[4], []]
on 29 Oct 2013 at 7:41 pm Python code to pick out all possible combinations from a list? | Ask & Answers

[…] found some code (by googling) that apparently does what I’m looking for, but I found the code fairly opaque […]
on 17 Mar 2015 at 3:00 am P.K. Subramanian

Yes. You got this wrong.

When you don’t have import copy module this is completely useless.
on 01 Dec 2015 at 10:03 am Python code to pick out all possible combinations from a list? | Questions

[…] found some code (by googling) that apparently does what I’m looking for, but I found the code fairly opaque […]
on 23 Dec 2015 at 6:30 pm Python code to pick out all possible combinations from a list? | ASK AND ANSWER

[…] found some code (by googling) that apparently does what I’m looking for, but I found the code fairly opaque […]
on 04 Oct 2017 at 10:07 am Big Man

oi

from the desk of stinkpot