Get ALL possible results from mixing array

Question

I\'ve looked everywhere for this online, but couldn\'t completely find it. (my PHP and math skills are letting my down for this one...) I have an array containing for exampl

Answer 1

There's an example function for permutations on O'Reilly's PHP Cookbook, section 4.26. It only creates permutations of a fixed size, but can be used in a loop to deal with any size like you need it.

Code

function pc_next_permutation($p, $size) {
    // slide down the array looking for where we're smaller than the next guy
    for ($i = $size - 1; $p[$i] >= $p[$i+1]; --$i) { }

    // if this doesn't occur, we've finished our permutations
    // the array is reversed: (1, 2, 3, 4) => (4, 3, 2, 1)
    if ($i == -1) { return false; }

    // slide down the array looking for a bigger number than what we found before
    for ($j = $size; $p[$j] <= $p[$i]; --$j) { }

    // swap them
    $tmp = $p[$i]; $p[$i] = $p[$j]; $p[$j] = $tmp;

    // now reverse the elements in between by swapping the ends
    for (++$i, $j = $size; $i < $j; ++$i, --$j) {
         $tmp = $p[$i]; $p[$i] = $p[$j]; $p[$j] = $tmp;
    }
    return $p;
}

$set = explode(' ', 'a b c');

// $all will contain the final output
$all = $set;
while(count($set) > 1) {
    $perms = array();
    $size = count($set) - 1;
    $perm = range(0, $size);
    $j = 0;

    do { 
         foreach ($perm as $i) { $perms[$j][] = $set[$i]; }
    } while ($perm = pc_next_permutation($perm, $size) and ++$j);

    foreach ($perms as $p) {
         $all[] = implode(' ', $p);
    }
    array_pop($set);    
}

// display results
foreach($all as $each) {
    echo $each . "\n";
}

Output

a
b
c
a b c
a c b
b a c
b c a
c a b
c b a
a b
b a

Live example