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 of letters that each number could represent.

A second part of the question was like what about if this would have been a 12 digit international number? How would that effect your design.

I don't have the code that I wrote in the interview, but I got the impression he wasn't happy with it.
What is the best way to do this?

Answer 1

In Python, iterative:

digit_map = {
    '2': 'abc',
    '3': 'def',
    '4': 'ghi',
    '5': 'jkl',
    '6': 'mno',
    '7': 'pqrs',
    '8': 'tuv',
    '9': 'wxyz',
}

def word_numbers(input):
  input = str(input)
  ret = ['']
  for char in input:
    letters = digit_map.get(char, '')
    ret = [prefix+letter for prefix in ret for letter in letters]
  return ret

ret is a list of results so far; initially it is populated with one item, the empty string. Then, for each character in the input string, it looks up the list of letters that match it from the dict defined at the top. It then replaces the list ret with the every combination of existing prefix and possible letter.