Get the cartesian product of a series of lists?

Question

How can I get the Cartesian product (every possible combination of values) from a group of lists?

Input:

somelists = [
   [1, 2, 3],
   ['a', 'b'],
   [4, 5]
]

Desired output:

[(1, 'a', 4), (1, 'a', 5), (1, 'b', 4), (1, 'b', 5), (2, 'a', 4), (2, 'a', 5) ...]

Answer 1

Just to add a bit to what has already been said: if you use sympy, you can use symbols rather than strings which makes them mathematically useful.

import itertools
import sympy

x, y = sympy.symbols('x y')

somelist = [[x,y], [1,2,3], [4,5]]
somelist2 = [[1,2], [1,2,3], [4,5]]

for element in itertools.product(*somelist):
  print element

About sympy.

Answer 2

A minor modification to the above recursive generator solution in variadic flavor:

def product_args(*args):
    if args:
        for a in args[0]:
            for prod in product_args(*args[1:]) if args[1:] else ((),):
                yield (a,) + prod

And of course a wrapper which makes it work exactly the same as that solution:

def product2(ar_list):
    """
    >>> list(product(()))
    [()]
    >>> list(product2(()))
    []
    """
    return product_args(*ar_list)

with one trade-off: it checks if recursion should break upon each outer loop, and one gain: no yield upon empty call, e.g.product(()), which I suppose would be semantically more correct (see the doctest).

Regarding list comprehension: the mathematical definition applies to an arbitrary number of arguments, while list comprehension could only deal with a known number of them.

Answer 3

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 4

In Python 2.6+

import itertools
for element in itertools.product(*somelists):
    print(element)

Documentation: Python 3 - itertools.product

Answer 5

Here is a recursive generator, which doesn't store any temporary lists

def product(ar_list):
    if not ar_list:
        yield ()
    else:
        for a in ar_list[0]:
            for prod in product(ar_list[1:]):
                yield (a,)+prod

print list(product([[1,2],[3,4],[5,6]]))

Output:

[(1, 3, 5), (1, 3, 6), (1, 4, 5), (1, 4, 6), (2, 3, 5), (2, 3, 6), (2, 4, 5), (2, 4, 6)]

Answer 6

Although there are many answers already, I would like to share some of my thoughts:

Iterative approach

def cartesian_iterative(pools):
  result = [[]]
  for pool in pools:
    result = [x+[y] for x in result for y in pool]
  return result

Recursive Approach

def cartesian_recursive(pools):
  if len(pools) > 2:
    pools[0] = product(pools[0], pools[1])
    del pools[1]
    return cartesian_recursive(pools)
  else:
    pools[0] = product(pools[0], pools[1])
    del pools[1]
    return pools
def product(x, y):
  return [xx + [yy] if isinstance(xx, list) else [xx] + [yy] for xx in x for yy in y]

Lambda Approach

def cartesian_reduct(pools):
  return reduce(lambda x,y: product(x,y) , pools)