[SOLVED] What is the best way to generate all possible three letter strings?

Issue

I am generating all possible three letters keywords e.g. aaa, aab, aac.... zzy, zzz below is my code:

alphabets = ['a', 'b', 'c', 'd', 'e', 'f', 'g', 'h', 'i', 'j', 'k', 'l', 'm', 'n', 'o', 'p', 'q', 'r', 's', 't', 'u', 'v', 'w', 'x', 'y', 'z']

keywords = []
for alpha1 in alphabets:
    for alpha2 in alphabets:
        for alpha3 in alphabets:
            keywords.append(alpha1+alpha2+alpha3)

Can this functionality be achieved in a more sleek and efficient way?

Solution

keywords = itertools.product(alphabets, repeat = 3)

See the documentation for itertools.product. If you need a list of strings, just use

keywords = [''.join(i) for i in itertools.product(alphabets, repeat = 3)]

alphabets also doesn’t need to be a list, it can just be a string, for example:

from itertools import product
from string import ascii_lowercase
keywords = [''.join(i) for i in product(ascii_lowercase, repeat = 3)]

will work if you just want the lowercase ascii letters.

Answered By – agf

Answer Checked By – Senaida (BugsFixing Volunteer)