Finding the ranking of a word (permutations) with duplicate letters

Question

I'm posting this although much has already been posted about this question. I didn't want to post as an answer since it's not working. The answer to this post (Finding the rank of the Given string in list of all possible permutations with Duplicates) did not work for me.

So I tried this (which is a compilation of code I've plagiarized and my attempt to deal with repetitions). The non-repeating cases work fine. BOOKKEEPER generates 83863, not the desired 10743.

(The factorial function and letter counter array 'repeats' are working correctly. I didn't post to save space.)

while (pointer != length)
{
    if (sortedWordChars[pointer] != wordArray[pointer])
    {
        // Swap the current character with the one after that
        char temp = sortedWordChars[pointer];
        sortedWordChars[pointer] = sortedWordChars[next];
        sortedWordChars[next] = temp;
        next++;

        //For each position check how many characters left have duplicates, 
        //and use the logic that if you need to permute n things and if 'a' things 
        //are similar the number of permutations is n!/a!


        int ct = repeats[(sortedWordChars[pointer]-64)];
        // Increment the rank
        if (ct>1) { //repeats?
            System.out.println("repeating " + (sortedWordChars[pointer]-64));
            //In case of repetition of any character use: (n-1)!/(times)!
            //e.g. if there is 1 character which is repeating twice,
            //x* (n-1)!/2!                      
                int dividend = getFactorialIter(length - pointer - 1);
                int divisor = getFactorialIter(ct);
                int quo = dividend/divisor;
                rank += quo;
        } else {
            rank += getFactorialIter(length - pointer - 1);                 
        }                       
    } else
    {
        pointer++;
        next = pointer + 1;
    }
}

Answer 1

Note: this answer is for 1-based rankings, as specified implicitly by example. Here's some Python that works at least for the two examples provided. The key fact is that suffixperms * ctr[y] // ctr[x] is the number of permutations whose first letter is y of the length-(i + 1) suffix of perm.

from collections import Counter

def rankperm(perm):
    rank = 1
    suffixperms = 1
    ctr = Counter()
    for i in range(len(perm)):
        x = perm[((len(perm) - 1) - i)]
        ctr[x] += 1
        for y in ctr:
            if (y < x):
                rank += ((suffixperms * ctr[y]) // ctr[x])
        suffixperms = ((suffixperms * (i + 1)) // ctr[x])
    return rank
print(rankperm('QUESTION'))
print(rankperm('BOOKKEEPER'))

Java version:

public static long rankPerm(String perm) {
    long rank = 1;
    long suffixPermCount = 1;
    java.util.Map<Character, Integer> charCounts =
        new java.util.HashMap<Character, Integer>();
    for (int i = perm.length() - 1; i > -1; i--) {
        char x = perm.charAt(i);
        int xCount = charCounts.containsKey(x) ? charCounts.get(x) + 1 : 1;
        charCounts.put(x, xCount);
        for (java.util.Map.Entry<Character, Integer> e : charCounts.entrySet()) {
            if (e.getKey() < x) {
                rank += suffixPermCount * e.getValue() / xCount;
            }
        }
        suffixPermCount *= perm.length() - i;
        suffixPermCount /= xCount;
    }
    return rank;
}

Unranking permutations:

from collections import Counter

def unrankperm(letters, rank):
    ctr = Counter()
    permcount = 1
    for i in range(len(letters)):
        x = letters[i]
        ctr[x] += 1
        permcount = (permcount * (i + 1)) // ctr[x]
    # ctr is the histogram of letters
    # permcount is the number of distinct perms of letters
    perm = []
    for i in range(len(letters)):
        for x in sorted(ctr.keys()):
            # suffixcount is the number of distinct perms that begin with x
            suffixcount = permcount * ctr[x] // (len(letters) - i)
            if rank <= suffixcount:
                perm.append(x)
                permcount = suffixcount
                ctr[x] -= 1
                if ctr[x] == 0:
                    del ctr[x]
                break
            rank -= suffixcount
    return ''.join(perm)