permutations with unique values

Question

itertools.permutations generates where its elements are treated as unique based on their position, not on their value. So basically I want to avoid duplicates like this:

Answer 1

Bumped into this question while looking for something myself !

Here's what I did:

def dont_repeat(x=[0,1,1,2]): # Pass a list
    from itertools import permutations as per
    uniq_set = set()
    for byt_grp in per(x, 4):
        if byt_grp not in uniq_set:
            yield byt_grp
            uniq_set.update([byt_grp])
    print uniq_set

for i in dont_repeat(): print i
(0, 1, 1, 2)
(0, 1, 2, 1)
(0, 2, 1, 1)
(1, 0, 1, 2)
(1, 0, 2, 1)
(1, 1, 0, 2)
(1, 1, 2, 0)
(1, 2, 0, 1)
(1, 2, 1, 0)
(2, 0, 1, 1)
(2, 1, 0, 1)
(2, 1, 1, 0)
set([(0, 1, 1, 2), (1, 0, 1, 2), (2, 1, 0, 1), (1, 2, 0, 1), (0, 1, 2, 1), (0, 2, 1, 1), (1, 1, 2, 0), (1, 2, 1, 0), (2, 1, 1, 0), (1, 0, 2, 1), (2, 0, 1, 1), (1, 1, 0, 2)])

Basically, make a set and keep adding to it. Better than making lists etc. that take too much memory.. Hope it helps the next person looking out :-) Comment out the set 'update' in the function to see the difference.