Generating permutations with repetitions

Bwmat picture Bwmat · Jun 23, 2010 · Viewed 63.4k times · Source

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

miku picture miku · Jun 23, 2010

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)