Finding all combinations of well-formed brackets

Question

This came up while talking to a friend and I thought I\'d ask here since it\'s an interesting problem and would like to see other people\'s solutions.

The task is to

Answer 1

Not the most elegant solution, but this was how I did it in C++ (Visual Studio 2008). Leveraging the STL set to eliminate duplicates, I just naively insert new () pairs into each string index in every string from the previous generation, then recurse.

#include "stdafx.h"
#include 
#include 
#include 

using namespace System;
using namespace std;

typedef set StrSet;

void ExpandSet( StrSet &Results, int Curr, int Max )
{
    if (Curr < Max)
    {
        StrSet NewResults;

        for (StrSet::iterator it = Results.begin(); it != Results.end(); ++it)
        {
            for (unsigned int stri=0; stri < (*it).length(); stri++)
            {
                string NewStr( *it );
                NewResults.insert( NewStr.insert( stri, string("()") ) );
            }
        }
        ExpandSet( NewResults, Curr+1, Max );

        Results = NewResults;
    }
}    

int main(array ^args)
{
    int ParenCount = 0;

    cout << "Enter the parens to balance:" << endl;
    cin  >> ParenCount;

    StrSet Results;
    Results.insert( string("()") );

    ExpandSet(Results, 1, ParenCount);

    cout << Results.size() << ": Total # of results for " << ParenCount << " parens:" << endl;

    for (StrSet::iterator it = Results.begin(); it != Results.end(); ++it)
    {
        cout << *it << endl;
    }


    return 0;
}