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How Can I Efficiently Generate All Possible Subsets of a List of Numbers in Python?

Patricia Arquette
Patricia ArquetteOriginal
2025-01-05 14:43:47562browse

How Can I Efficiently Generate All Possible Subsets of a List of Numbers in Python?

Getting All Possible Combinations from a List of Numbers

The task is to obtain all possible combinations (2^N) of a list's elements, regardless of their length.

Brute-Force Approach

One possible approach is to loop through the decimal integers 1–32768 and use their binary representations as filters to select the corresponding list elements. However, this method has a time complexity of O(32768), which can be inefficient for large lists.

Optimized Solution

A more efficient solution is to use the itertools library. The following code generates all possible combinations of the list elements in Python:

import itertools

stuff = [1, 2, 3]
combinations = list(itertools.chain(*map(lambda x: itertools.combinations(stuff, x), range(0, len(stuff)+1))))

for subset in combinations:
    print(subset)

This code generates all subsets of the given list, including the empty set and the original list itself. It does so by creating a generator that generates all possible combinations for each length "L" and then using the chain() function to concatenate all the generators into a single iterable.

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