Algorithm to generate all possible permutations of a list?

Posted by LLer on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by LLer
Published on 2010-04-26T01:52:19Z Indexed on 2010/04/26 1:53 UTC
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Say I have a list of n elements, I know there are n! possible ways to order these elements. What is an algorithm to generate all possible orderings of this list? Example, I have list [a, b, c]. The algorithm would return [[a, b, c], [a, c, b,], [b, a, c], [b, c, a], [c, a, b], [c, b, a]].

I'm reading this here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permutation#Algorithms_to_generate_permutations

But Wikipedia has never been good at explaining. I don't understand much of it.

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