Get the cartesian product of a series of lists?

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Track title: Puzzle Game Looping

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Chapters
00:00 Question
00:55 Accepted answer (Score 586)
01:18 Answer 2 (Score 121)
01:32 Answer 3 (Score 45)
02:11 Answer 4 (Score 39)
02:27 Thank you

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Full question
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5339...

Question links:
[Avoiding nested for loops]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1117...
[Operation on every pair of element in a list]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9425...
[Generating permutations with repetitions]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3099...

Accepted answer links:
[itertools.product]: https://docs.python.org/3/library/iterto...

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Content licensed under CC BY-SA
https://meta.stackexchange.com/help/lice...

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Tags
#python #list #cartesianproduct

#avk47

ACCEPTED ANSWER

Score 657

Use itertools.product, which has been available since Python 2.6.

import itertools

somelists = [
   [1, 2, 3],
   ['a', 'b'],
   [4, 5]
]
for element in itertools.product(*somelists):
    print(element)

This is the same as:

for element in itertools.product([1, 2, 3], ['a', 'b'], [4, 5]):
    print(element)

ANSWER 2

Score 126

import itertools
>>> for i in itertools.product([1,2,3],['a','b'],[4,5]):
...         print i
...
(1, 'a', 4)
(1, 'a', 5)
(1, 'b', 4)
(1, 'b', 5)
(2, 'a', 4)
(2, 'a', 5)
(2, 'b', 4)
(2, 'b', 5)
(3, 'a', 4)
(3, 'a', 5)
(3, 'b', 4)
(3, 'b', 5)
>>>

ANSWER 3

Score 45

For Python 2.5 and older:

>>> [(a, b, c) for a in [1,2,3] for b in ['a','b'] for c in [4,5]]
[(1, 'a', 4), (1, 'a', 5), (1, 'b', 4), (1, 'b', 5), (2, 'a', 4), 
 (2, 'a', 5), (2, 'b', 4), (2, 'b', 5), (3, 'a', 4), (3, 'a', 5), 
 (3, 'b', 4), (3, 'b', 5)]

Here's a recursive version of product() (just an illustration):

def product(*args):
    if not args:
        return iter(((),)) # yield tuple()
    return (items + (item,) 
            for items in product(*args[:-1]) for item in args[-1])

Example:

>>> list(product([1,2,3], ['a','b'], [4,5])) 
[(1, 'a', 4), (1, 'a', 5), (1, 'b', 4), (1, 'b', 5), (2, 'a', 4), 
 (2, 'a', 5), (2, 'b', 4), (2, 'b', 5), (3, 'a', 4), (3, 'a', 5), 
 (3, 'b', 4), (3, 'b', 5)]
>>> list(product([1,2,3]))
[(1,), (2,), (3,)]
>>> list(product([]))
[]
>>> list(product())
[()]

ANSWER 4

Score 36

With itertools.product:

import itertools
result = list(itertools.product(*somelists))