Creating an array of numbers that sum to a given number

Question

I\'ve been working on some quick and dirty scripts for doing some of my chemistry homework, and one of them iterates through lists of a constant length where all the element

Answer 1

Here's a recursive generator that yields the lists in lexicographic order. Leaving exact as True gives the requested result where every sum==limit; setting exact to False gives all lists with 0 <= sum <= limit. The recursion takes advantage of this option to produce the intermediate results.

def lists_with_sum(length, limit, exact=True):
    if length:
        for l in lists_with_sum(length-1, limit, False):
            gap = limit-sum(l)
            for i in range(gap if exact else 0, gap+1):
                yield l + [i]
    else:
        yield []

Answer 2

Generic, recursive solution:

def get_lists_with_sum(length, my_sum):
    if my_sum == 0:
        return [[0 for _ in range(length)]]

    if not length:
        return [[]]
    elif length == 1:
        return [[my_sum]]
    else:
        lists = []
        for i in range(my_sum+1):
            rest = my_sum - i
            sublists = get_lists_with_sum(length-1, rest)
            for sl in sublists:
                sl.insert(0, i)
                lists.append(sl)

    return lists

print get_lists_with_sum(11, 8)