All combinations of a list of lists

Question

I'm basically looking for a python version of Combination of List<List<int>>

Given a list of lists, I need a new list that gives all the possible combinations of items between the lists.

[[1,2,3],[4,5,6],[7,8,9,10]] -> [[1,4,7],[1,4,8],...,[3,6,10]]

The number of lists is unknown, so I need something that works for all cases. Bonus points for elegance!

Answer 1

you need itertools.product:

>>> import itertools
>>> a = [[1,2,3],[4,5,6],[7,8,9,10]]
>>> list(itertools.product(*a))
[(1, 4, 7), (1, 4, 8), (1, 4, 9), (1, 4, 10), (1, 5, 7), (1, 5, 8), (1, 5, 9), (1, 5, 10), (1, 6, 7), (1, 6, 8), (1, 6, 9), (1, 6, 10), (2, 4, 7), (2, 4, 8), (2, 4, 9), (2, 4, 10), (2, 5, 7), (2, 5, 8), (2, 5, 9), (2, 5, 10), (2, 6, 7), (2, 6, 8), (2, 6, 9), (2, 6, 10), (3, 4, 7), (3, 4, 8), (3, 4, 9), (3, 4, 10), (3, 5, 7), (3, 5, 8), (3, 5, 9), (3, 5, 10), (3, 6, 7), (3, 6, 8), (3, 6, 9), (3, 6, 10)]

Answer 2

The most elegant solution is to use itertools.product in python 2.6.

If you aren't using Python 2.6, the docs for itertools.product actually show an equivalent function to do the product the "manual" way (he says, cheating by pasting in the sample from the python docs):

def product(*args, **kwds):
    # product('ABCD', 'xy') --> Ax Ay Bx By Cx Cy Dx Dy
    # product(range(2), repeat=3) --> 000 001 010 011 100 101 110 111
    pools = map(tuple, args) * kwds.get('repeat', 1)
    result = [[]]
    for pool in pools:
        result = [x+[y] for x in result for y in pool]
    for prod in result:
        yield tuple(prod)

Answer 3

listOLists = [[1,2,3],[4,5,6],[7,8,9,10]]
for list in itertools.product(*listOLists):
  print list;

I hope you find that as elegant as I did when I first encountered it.