All possible replacements of two lists?

Question

(I am aware that the title of the question might be misleading, but I could not find any other way to formulate it - feel free to edit it)

I have two lists, both of

Answer 1

Okay this is similar to the other answers, but taking a bit from both. You can model your problem as finding all possible bits of a sequence of given length, and replacing only when there is 1, and otherwise not.

from itertools import product

a = [1,2,3]
b = [4,5,6]

## All binary combinations of length of a (or b)
combinations = product([0,1], repeat=len(a))

for combination in combinations:
    y = []
    for l, i in zip(zip(a,b),combination):
         y.append(l[i])
    print y

All combinations of bits are:

(0, 0, 0)
(0, 0, 1)
(0, 1, 0)
(0, 1, 1)
(1, 0, 0)
(1, 0, 1)
(1, 1, 0)
(1, 1, 1)

Which results in:

[1, 2, 3]
[1, 2, 6]
[1, 5, 3]
[1, 5, 6]
[4, 2, 3]
[4, 2, 6]
[4, 5, 3]
[4, 5, 6]