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

A Python solution is quite economical, and because it uses generators is efficient in terms of memory use.

import itertools

keys = dict(enumerate('::ABC:DEF:GHI:JKL:MNO:PQRS:TUV:WXYZ'.split(':')))

def words(number):
    digits = map(int, str(number))
    for ls in itertools.product(*map(keys.get, digits)):
        yield ''.join(ls)

for w in words(258):
    print w

Obviously itertools.product is solving most of the problem for you. But writing it oneself is not difficult. Here's a solution in go, which is careful to re-use the array result to generate all solutions in, and a closure f to capture the generated words. Combined, these give O(log n) memory use inside product.

package main

import (
    "bytes"
    "fmt"
    "strconv"
)

func product(choices [][]byte, result []byte, i int, f func([]byte)) {
    if i == len(result) {
        f(result)
        return
    }
    for _, c := range choices[i] {
        result[i] = c
        product(choices, result, i+1, f)
    }
}

var keys = bytes.Split([]byte("::ABC:DEF:GHI:JKL:MNO:PQRS:TUV:WXYZ"), []byte(":"))

func words(num int, f func([]byte)) {
    ch := [][]byte{}
    for _, b := range strconv.Itoa(num) {
        ch = append(ch, keys[b-'0'])
    }
    product(ch, make([]byte, len(ch)), 0, f)
}

func main() {
    words(256, func(b []byte) { fmt.Println(string(b)) })
}