All possible words

Question

I want to create all possible 5 letter words using a-z.Please suggest any good and fast algorithms.

I have tried creating one and it looks something like this...

     byte[] allchar=new byte[] {'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'};
 int lengthOfAllChar=allchar.length;
         System.out.println(lengthOfAllChar);
        for (int i = 0; i < lengthOfAllChar; i++){
            for(int j = 0; i < lengthOfAllChar; j++){
                StringBuffer finalWordBuffer = new StringBuffer();
                finalWordBuffer.append((char)allchar[i]);
                finalWordBuffer.append((char)allchar[j]);
            }
        }

Answer 1

public static List<String> getAll(int length) {
    final char[] chars = "0123456789".toCharArray();
    final double NUMBER_OF_PERMUTATIONS = Math.pow(chars.length, length);

    List<String> words = new ArrayList<>(Double.valueOf(
            NUMBER_OF_PERMUTATIONS).intValue());

    char[] temp = new char[length];
    Arrays.fill(temp, '0');

    for (int i = 0; i < NUMBER_OF_PERMUTATIONS; i++) {
        int n = i;
        for (int k = 0; k < length; k++) {
            temp[k] = chars[n % chars.length];
            n /= chars.length;
        }
        words.add(String.valueOf(temp));
    }
    return words;
}  

Here is the Java 7 version of antti.huima's code.

Answer 2

Here's an example of generating all sequences for any set of characters at any length:

public class WordPermutations {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        char[] chars = "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz".toCharArray();
        int len = 5;
        iterate(chars, len, new char[len], 0);
    }

    public static void iterate(char[] chars, int len, char[] build, int pos) {
        if (pos == len) {
            String word = new String(build);
            // do what you need with each word here
            return;
        }

        for (int i = 0; i < chars.length; i++) {
            build[pos] = chars[i];
            iterate(chars, len, build, pos + 1);
        }
    }
}

This takes about 250ms on my machine to iterate through all 11,881,376 sequences.

Note that a new char[len] is only created once at the beginning and reused as build for building the permutations. The first call to iterate() starts with a pos of 0. Skip down to the for loop where it loops through each of chars. The first char of build is set to that and then we recursively call the same method to set the next one at pos + 1. Once this has happened 5 times the pos will be at len. This is when the pos == len kicks in at the top of the method. Then it just builds a String from what's built up in build and there's your word.