Generating all combinations of a list in python

Question

Here's the question:

Given a list of items in Python, how would I go by to get all the possible combinations of the items?

There are several similar questions on this site, that suggest using itertools.combine, but that returns only a subset of what I need:

stuff = [1, 2, 3]
for L in range(0, len(stuff)+1):
    for subset in itertools.combinations(stuff, L):
        print(subset)

()
(1,)
(2,)
(3,)
(1, 2)
(1, 3)
(2, 3)
(1, 2, 3)

As you see, it returns only items in a strict order, not returning (2, 1), (3, 2), (3, 1), (2, 1, 3), (3, 1, 2), (2, 3, 1), and (3, 2, 1). Is there some workaround that? I can't seem to come up with anything.

Answer 1

Use itertools.permutations:

>>> import itertools
>>> stuff = [1, 2, 3]
>>> for L in range(0, len(stuff)+1):
        for subset in itertools.permutations(stuff, L):
                print(subset)
...         
()
(1,)
(2,)
(3,)
(1, 2)
(1, 3)
(2, 1)
(2, 3)
(3, 1)
....

help on itertools.permutations:

permutations(iterable[, r]) --> permutations object

Return successive r-length permutations of elements in the iterable.

permutations(range(3), 2) --> (0,1), (0,2), (1,0), (1,2), (2,0), (2,1)
>>>