How to generate permutations of a list without “reverse duplicates” in Python using generators

Question

This is related to question How to generate all permutations of a list in Python

How to generate all permutations that match following criteria: if

Answer 1

EDIT: changed completely to keep everything as a generator (never the whole list in memory). Should fulfill the requirements (only calculates half of the possible permutations (not the reverse ones). EDIT2: added shorter (and simpler) factorial function from here.

EDIT3:: (see comments) - a version with improvements can be found in bwopah's version.

def fac(x): 
    return (1 if x==0 else x * fac(x-1))

def all_permutations(plist):
    global counter

    if len(plist) <=1:
        yield plist
    else:
        for perm in all_permutations(plist[1:]):
            for i in xrange(len(perm)+1):
                if len(perm[:i] + plist[0:1] + perm[i:]) == lenplist:
                        if counter == limit:
                             raise StopIteration
                        else:
                             counter = counter + 1
                yield perm[:i] + plist[0:1] + perm[i:]

counter = 0
plist = ['a','b','c']
lenplist = len(plist)
limit = fac(lenplist) / 2

all_permutations_gen = all_permutations(plist)
print all_permutations_gen
print list(all_permutations_gen)