FAST unique combinations (from list with duplicates) WITHOUT LOOKUPS

Question

I seems that in spite of the fact that there are online plenty of algorithms and functions for generating unique combinations of any size from a list of unique items, there

Answer 1

Instead of post-processing/filtering your output, you can pre-process your input list. This way, you can avoid generating duplicates in the first place. Pre-processing involves either sorting (or using a collections.Counter on) the input. One possible recursive realization is:

def subbags(bag, k):
    a = sorted(bag)
    n = len(a)
    sub = []

    def index_of_next_unique_item(i):
        j = i + 1

        while j < n and a[j] == a[i]:
            j += 1

        return j

    def combinate(i):
        if len(sub) == k:
            yield tuple(sub)
        elif n - i >= k - len(sub):
            sub.append(a[i])
            yield from combinate(i + 1)
            sub.pop()
            yield from combinate(index_of_next_unique_item(i))

    yield from combinate(0)

bag = [1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 1]
k = 3
i = -1

print(sorted(bag), k)
print('---')

for i, subbag in enumerate(subbags(bag, k)):
    print(subbag)

print('---')
print(i + 1)

Output:

[1, 1, 1, 2, 2, 3] 3
---
(1, 1, 1)
(1, 1, 2)
(1, 1, 3)
(1, 2, 2)
(1, 2, 3)
(2, 2, 3)
---
6

Requires some stack space for the recursion, but this + sorting the input should use substantially less time + memory than generating and discarding repeats.