Compute all permutations of a string in Python

(As a side note, that posting is from 2010.)

As an alternative to writing the code yourself, there's itertools.permutations(). The Python itertools module documentation also gives a pure Python implementation of that function.

itertools.permutations() does not give the same output as in the linked-to page because it returns tuples rather than strings. That is:

    >>> list(itertools.permutations("abc"))
    [('a', 'b', 'c'), ('a', 'c', 'b'), ('b', 'a', 'c'),
    ('b', 'c', 'a'), ('c', 'a', 'b'), ('c', 'b', 'a')]

instead of "abc", "acb", "bac", etc. It can also work on any indexable data type instead of just on strings.

As for timings, I tested permutations("a" * 10)

     0.53 seconds for itertools.permutations (in C)
    17.   seconds for the version on jeremy-boyd.com (in Python)
    25.   seconds for the itertools documentation version #1 (Python)
    ???   seconds for the itertools documentation version #2 (Python)

I actually gave up on the last one. It computed "a" * 7 in 0.5 seconds, "a" * 8 in 12 seconds and "a" * 9 in 320.