Listing all permutations of a string/integer

Question

A common task in programming interviews (not from my experience of interviews though) is to take a string or an integer and list every possible permutation.

Is there

Answer 1

I liked FBryant87 approach since it's simple. Unfortunately, it does like many other "solutions" not offer all permutations or of e.g. an integer if it contains the same digit more than once. Take 656123 as an example. The line:

var tail = chars.Except(new List(){c});

using Except will cause all occurrences to be removed, i.e. when c = 6, two digits are removed and we are left with e.g. 5123. Since none of the solutions I tried solved this, I decided to try and solve it myself by FBryant87's code as base. This is what I came up with:

private static List FindPermutations(string set)
    {
        var output = new List();
        if (set.Length == 1)
        {
            output.Add(set);
        }
        else
        {
            foreach (var c in set)
            {
                // Remove one occurrence of the char (not all)
                var tail = set.Remove(set.IndexOf(c), 1);
                foreach (var tailPerms in FindPermutations(tail))
                {
                    output.Add(c + tailPerms);
                }
            }
        }
        return output;
    }

I simply just remove the first found occurrence using .Remove and .IndexOf. Seems to work as intended for my usage at least. I'm sure it could be made cleverer.

One thing to note though: The resulting list may contain duplicates, so make sure you either make the method return e.g. a HashSet instead or remove the duplicates after the return using any method you like.