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

This is wild because none of these answers actually provide the return of an actual Python set. Here is a messy implementation that will give a powerset that actually is a Python set.

test_set = set(['yo', 'whatup', 'money'])
def powerset( base_set ):
    """ modified from pydoc's itertools recipe shown above"""
    from itertools import chain, combinations
    base_list = list( base_set )
    combo_list = [ combinations(base_list, r) for r in range(len(base_set)+1) ]

    powerset = set([])
    for ll in combo_list:
        list_of_frozensets = list( map( frozenset, map( list, ll ) ) ) 
        set_of_frozensets = set( list_of_frozensets )
        powerset = powerset.union( set_of_frozensets )

    return powerset

print powerset( test_set )
# >>> set([ frozenset(['money','whatup']), frozenset(['money','whatup','yo']), 
#        frozenset(['whatup']), frozenset(['whatup','yo']), frozenset(['yo']),
#        frozenset(['money','yo']), frozenset(['money']), frozenset([]) ])

I'd love to see a better implementation, though.