How to get all subsets of a set? (powerset)

Question

Given a set

{0, 1, 2, 3}

How can I produce the subsets:

[set(),
 {0},
 {1},
 {2},
 {3},
 {0, 1},
 {0, 2},
 {0, 3},
 {1, 2}         


        

Answer 1

I have found the following algorithm very clear and simple:

def get_powerset(some_list):
    """Returns all subsets of size 0 - len(some_list) for some_list"""
    if len(some_list) == 0:
        return [[]]

    subsets = []
    first_element = some_list[0]
    remaining_list = some_list[1:]
    # Strategy: get all the subsets of remaining_list. For each
    # of those subsets, a full subset list will contain both
    # the original subset as well as a version of the subset
    # that contains first_element
    for partial_subset in get_powerset(remaining_list):
        subsets.append(partial_subset)
        subsets.append(partial_subset[:] + [first_element])

    return subsets

Another way one can generate the powerset is by generating all binary numbers that have n bits. As a power set the amount of number with n digits is 2 ^ n. The principle of this algorithm is that an element could be present or not in a subset as a binary digit could be one or zero but not both.

def power_set(items):
    N = len(items)
    # enumerate the 2 ** N possible combinations
    for i in range(2 ** N):
        combo = []
        for j in range(N):
            # test bit jth of integer i
            if (i >> j) % 2 == 1:
                combo.append(items[j])
        yield combo

I found both algorithms when I was taking MITx: 6.00.2x Introduction to Computational Thinking and Data Science, and I consider it is one of the easiest algorithms to understand I have seen.