Generate list of all possible permutations of a string

Question

How would I go about generating a list of all possible permutations of a string between x and y characters in length, containing a variable list of characters.

Any l

Answer 1

This code in python, when called with allowed_characters set to [0,1] and 4 character max, would generate 2^4 results:

['0000', '0001', '0010', '0011', '0100', '0101', '0110', '0111', '1000', '1001', '1010', '1011', '1100', '1101', '1110', '1111']

def generate_permutations(chars = 4) :

#modify if in need!
    allowed_chars = [
        '0',
        '1',
    ]

    status = []
    for tmp in range(chars) :
        status.append(0)

    last_char = len(allowed_chars)

    rows = []
    for x in xrange(last_char ** chars) :
        rows.append("")
        for y in range(chars - 1 , -1, -1) :
            key = status[y]
            rows[x] = allowed_chars[key] + rows[x]

        for pos in range(chars - 1, -1, -1) :
            if(status[pos] == last_char - 1) :
                status[pos] = 0
            else :
                status[pos] += 1
                break;

    return rows

import sys


print generate_permutations()

Hope this is of use to you. Works with any character, not only numbers