Iterate through Array?

Ruby
1

I’ve been messing around with generating all possible combinations of a
set of letters, (Ala, a 6 letter set would start enumerating at “aaaaaa”
then move on to “aaaaab” so on and so forth, all the way down to
“zzzzz”) by iterating through an array using slice() , Which is a pretty
good implementation for small tasks, But suppose I wanted to generate
larger sets, Is there a more efficient implementation than say

 a=0
 b=0
 c=0
 d=0
 e=0
 f=0
 z = ["a", "b", "c", "d", "e", "f", "g", "h", "i", "j", "k", "l",

“m”, “n”, “o”, “p”, “q”, “r”, “s”, “t”, “u”, “v”, “w”, “x”, “y”, “z”]

slice = z.slice(a) + z.slice(b) + z.slice© + z.slice(d) + z.slice(e) +
z.slice(f)

if…
else… [Incrementing]

 puts slice

Thank you in advance

2

Zephyr P. wrote:

I’ve been messing around with generating all possible combinations of a
set of letters, (Ala, a 6 letter set would start enumerating at “aaaaaa”
then move on to “aaaaab” so on and so forth, all the way down to
“zzzzz”)

(“aaaaaa”…“zzzzzz”).each do |string|
puts string
end

This will run for a good while, but it won’t hog memory the way a
solution
populating an array would.

HTH,
Sebastian

3

You might also try the Permutations gem at
http://permutation.rubyforge.org/

4

You might also try the Permutations gem …

Or use the Combinatorial Object Server and the Hpricot gem. Pass in your
parameters for the combinatorial object and scrape your results out of
the table cells. I don’t believe there is an API for the COS but
scraping the hrml results is quite easy.

Combinatorial Object Server
http://theory.cs.uvic.ca/root.html

5

What about something as simple as

i = 0
“aaaaa”.upto(“zzzzz”) {|s| i += 1; puts “#{i}. #{s}”}

You could write to a file if you wish. Note that “aaaaa”.upto(“zzzzz”)
is NOT the same as “a”.upto(“zzzzz”)

6

Sebastian H. wrote:

This will run for a good while, but it won’t hog memory the way a solution
populating an array would.

HTH,
Sebastian

Impressive, Signifigantly less RAM usage.