what's a good way to combinate through a set?

Question

Given a set {a,b,c,d} What's a good way to produce {a,b,c,d,ab,ac,ad,bc,bd,cd,abc,abd,abcd}?

A recursive algorithm, I think, but maybe some weird lambda thing would work better. I'm using python.

Answer 1

The Python itertools page has exactly a powerset recipe for this:

def powerset(iterable):
    "powerset([1,2,3]) --> () (1,) (2,) (3,) (1,2) (1,3) (2,3) (1,2,3)"
    s = list(iterable)
    return chain.from_iterable(combinations(s, r) for r in range(len(s)+1))

Output:

>>> list(powerset("abcd"))
[(), ('a',), ('b',), ('c',), ('d',), ('a', 'b'), ('a', 'c'), ('a', 'd'), ('b', 'c'), ('b', 'd'), ('c', 'd'), ('a', 'b', 'c'), ('a', 'b', 'd'), ('a', 'c', 'd'), ('b', 'c', 'd'), ('a', 'b', 'c', 'd')]

If you don't like that empty tuple at the beginning, you can just change the range statement to range(1, len(s)+1) to avoid a 0-length combination.

Answer 2

Here is more code for a powerset. This is written from scratch:

>>> def powerset(s):
...     x = len(s)
...     for i in range(1 << x):
...             print [s[j] for j in range(x) if (i & (1 << j))]
...
>>> powerset([4,5,6])
[]
[4]
[5]
[4, 5]
[6]
[4, 6]
[5, 6]
[4, 5, 6]

Mark Rushakoff's comment is applicable here: "If you don't like that empty tuple at the beginning, on."you can just change the range statement to range(1, len(s)+1) to avoid a 0-length combination", except in my case you change "for i in range(1 << x)" to "for i in range(1, 1 << x)".

Answer 3

If you're looking for a quick answer, I just searched "python power set" on google and came up with this: Python Power Set Generator

Here's a copy-paste from the code in that page:

def powerset(seq):
    """
    Returns all the subsets of this set. This is a generator.
    """
    if len(seq) <= 1:
        yield seq
        yield []
    else:
        for item in powerset(seq[1:]):
            yield [seq[0]]+item
            yield item

This can be used like this:

 l = [1, 2, 3, 4]
 r = [x for x in powerset(l)]

Now r is a list of all the elements you wanted, and can be sorted and printed:

r.sort()
print r
[[], [1], [1, 2], [1, 2, 3], [1, 2, 3, 4], [1, 2, 4], [1, 3], [1, 3, 4], [1, 4], [2], [2, 3], [2, 3, 4], [2, 4], [3], [3, 4], [4]]

Answer 4

def powerset(lst):
    return reduce(lambda result, x: result + [subset + [x] for subset in result],
                  lst, [[]])