Question

I have a script that loops through a series of four (or less) characters strings. For example:

aaaa aaab aaac aaad 

If have been able to implement it with nested for loops like so:

chars = string.digits + string.uppercase + string.lowercase  for a in chars:     print '%s' % a        for b in chars:         print '%s%s' % (a, b)         for c in chars:             print '%s%s%s' % (a, b, c)             for d in chars:                 print '%s%s%s%s' % (a, b, c, d) 

Is this sort of loop nesting a bad thing, and if so, what would be a better way of accomplishing what I am doing?

Answer 1

import string import itertools  chars = string.digits + string.letters MAX_CHARS = 4 for nletters in range(MAX_CHARS):     for word in itertools.product(chars, repeat=nletters + 1):         print (''.join(word)) 

That’ll print all 15018570 words you’re looking for. If you want more/less words just change the MAX_CHARS variable. It will still have just two fors for any number of chars, and you don’t have to repeat yourself. And is pretty readable. .