How can I print out all possible letter combinations a given phone number can represent?

Question

I just tried for my first programming interview and one of the questions was to write a program that given a 7 digit telephone number, could print all possible combinations

Answer 1

Use a list L where L[i] = the symbols that digit i can represent.

L[1] = @,.,! (for example) L[2] = a,b,c

Etc.

Then you can do something like this (pseudo-C):

void f(int k, int st[])
{
  if ( k > numberOfDigits )
  {
    print contents of st[];
    return;
  }

  for each character c in L[Digit At Position k]
  {
    st[k] = c;
    f(k + 1, st);
  }
}

Assuming each list contains 3 characters, we have 3^7 possibilities for 7 digits and 3^12 for 12, which isn't that many. If you need all combinations, I don't see a much better way. You can avoid recursion and whatnot, but you're not going to get something a lot faster than this no matter what.