generating permutations with repetitions in python

Question

I know about itertools, but it seems it can only generate permutations without repetitions.

for example, I'd like to generate all possible dice rolls for 2 dice. So I need all permutations of size 2 of [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6] including repetitions: (1, 1), (1, 2), (2, 1)... etc

If possible I don't want to implement this from scratch

Answer 1

You are looking for the Cartesian Product.

In mathematics, a Cartesian product (or product set) is the direct product of two sets.

In your case, this would be {1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6} x {1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6}. itertools can help you there:

import itertools
x = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]
[p for p in itertools.product(x, repeat=2)]
[(1, 1), (1, 2), (1, 3), (1, 4), (1, 5), (1, 6), (2, 1), (2, 2), (2, 3), 
 (2, 4), (2, 5), (2, 6), (3, 1), (3, 2), (3, 3), (3, 4), (3, 5), (3, 6), 
 (4, 1), (4, 2), (4, 3), (4, 4), (4, 5), (4, 6), (5, 1), (5, 2), (5, 3), 
 (5, 4), (5, 5), (5, 6), (6, 1), (6, 2), (6, 3), (6, 4), (6, 5), (6, 6)]

To get a random dice roll (in a totally inefficient way):

import random
random.choice([p for p in itertools.product(x, repeat=2)])
(6, 3)

Answer 2

You're not looking for permutations - you want the Cartesian Product. For this use product from itertools:

from itertools import product
for roll in product([1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6], repeat = 2):
    print(roll)

Answer 3

In python 2.7 and 3.1 there is a itertools.combinations_with_replacement function:

>>> list(itertools.combinations_with_replacement([1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6], 2))
[(1, 1), (1, 2), (1, 3), (1, 4), (1, 5), (1, 6), (2, 2), (2, 3), (2, 4), 
 (2, 5), (2, 6), (3, 3), (3, 4), (3, 5), (3, 6), (4, 4), (4, 5), (4, 6),
 (5, 5), (5, 6), (6, 6)]

Answer 4

First, you'll want to turn the generator returned by itertools.permutations(list) into a list first. Then secondly, you can use set() to remove duplicates Something like below:

def permutate(a_list):
    import itertools
    return set(list(itertools.permutations(a_list)))

Answer 5

Here is c# version (even though its asked for python, the algorithm should be same) just for reference:

Below method basically takes no. of times the dice can be tossed to get to various permutations. For the above question, size should be '2'.

private void GetAllPermutationsOfDice_Recursive(int size, string currentValue, 
            List<string> values)
        {
            if(currentValue.Length == size)
            {
                values.Add(currentValue);
                return;
            }
            for(int i = 1; i<=6;i++)
            {
                this.GetAllPermutationsOfDice_Recursive(size, currentValue + i, values);   
            }
        }

To toss the dice twice, the above method can be called as:

public string[] GetAllPermutationsOfDiceOfSize_2()
        {
            List<string> values = new List<string>();
            this.GetAllPermutationsOfDice_Recursive(2, "", values);
            return values.ToArray();
        }

Following are corresponding unit tests:

[TestMethod]
        public void Dice_PermutationsTests()
        {
            var v = this.GetAllPermutationsOfDiceOfSize_2();
            Assert.AreEqual(36, v.Length);
            int l = 6;
            List<string> values = new List<string>();
            for(int i = 1; i<=4; i++)
            {
                values.Clear();
                this.GetAllPermutationsOfDice_Recursive(i, "", values);
                Assert.AreEqual(l, values.Count);
                l *= 6;
            }
        }