I'm writing [or thinking of writing] a programme to print out a list [to a text file] of every possible alpha-numeric character [including ".", "-", and "_"] combonation. Since I'm quite novice at programming, I'm having some difficulty determining how to do this. I'm thinking perhaps an array to hold the charactors, and a while loop to do the incrementing.
Any suggestions? ThanX!

Are you talking about permutations? That could be fairly easily accomplished with a LOT of (especially in your case) nested for loops. I'm sure there's a more elegant way to do it, though.

That would be relatively easy, like you said. A simple loop script, printing out every combination until it hits a point when it recognizes it. It would be a cinch in the wonderful PHP language! lol [addsig]

"a point until it recognizes it"?

Certainly you don't mean checking every combo you make with the already created list of combos. That would be realllly inefficient.

Well, I was speaking by possibility wise, not "I already have an idea" wise.

Quote:
On 2003-07-29 11:42, split wrote:
Are you talking about permutations? That could be fairly easily accomplished with a LOT of (especially in your case) nested for loops. I'm sure there's a more elegant way to do it, though.


Quote:
On 2003-07-29 11:42, split wrote:
Are you talking about permutations? That could be fairly easily accomplished with a LOT of (especially in your case) nested for loops. I'm sure there's a more elegant way to do it, though.


I think the more elegent way is with a recursive function. like:

s = "ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789_.-"

list = []
def i(c, l):
for x in s[:]:
if len(c) == l-1:
list.append(c+x)
else:
i(x+c, l)

i("", 5)
print list


That way you can specify an arbitrary number of characters.
I have a feeling it's unelegant to have the if inside of the for loop, but it was hard enough just to get it working. i seem to s_ck at recursive programming.

I guess he wants something like:

for x in range(10): i("", x)


[ This Message was edited by: inhahe on 2003-09-21 14:40 ]

[ This Message was edited by: inhahe on 2003-09-21 14:41 ]

[ This Message was edited by: inhahe on 2003-09-21 14:45 ]