Question

I’m trying to write python code to print the powerset of a string, but am running into some bugs. Here’s what I’ve got:

def getperm (string):
    perm = []
    if len(string) == 0:
        perm.append("")
        return perm
    #if len(string) == 1:
    #   perm.append(string)
    #   perm.append("")
    first = string[0]
    print "first = " + str(first)
    rem = string[1:len(string)]
    print "rem = " + str(rem)
    words = getperm(rem)
    for word in words:
        for i in range(len(word)):
            temp = string[0:i] + first + string[i:len(string)]
            print "temp = " + str(temp)
            perm.append(temp)

    return perm

if __name__=="__main__":
    a = "ab"
    mag  = getperm(a)
    print mag

My expected output would be:

['', 'a', 'b', 'ab']

My actual output is:

[]

Can anyone help me figure out what’s going on? Is this some nuance of python, or is there a bug in my code? I think my code should be ok — I’m going off the fifth edition of Cracking the coding interview

Thank you!

Answer 1

You’re overthinking it

This part is trying to do too much

for word in words:
    for i in range(len(word)):
        temp = string[0:i] + first + string[i:len(string)]
        print "temp = " + str(temp)
        perm.append(temp)

See how simple it really should be

def get_powerset (string):
    perm = []
    if len(string) == 0:
        perm.append("")
        return perm
    #if len(string) == 1:
    #   perm.append(string)
    #   perm.append("")
    first = string[0]
    print "first = " + str(first)
    rem = string[1:len(string)]
    print "rem = " + str(rem)
    words = get_powerset(rem)
    perm.extend(words)
    for word in words:
        perm.append(first+word)

    return perm

if __name__=="__main__":
    a = "ab"
    mag  = get_powerset(a)
    print mag

Now you should be able to make the code look a lot nicer with a little refactoring