Generating all possible combinations

Question

I'm writing some code and ended up with this problem. I have N products and I have to form all possible combinations of these products, form a product catalog and find some properties, like price. In order to do this I have to form the catalog of products from the given products (exhaustively, but no duplicates allowed). Is there a standardized algorithm for doing this? Note that the catalogs can contain any positive number of products.

Answer 1

Combinations can be represented by a bit-vector. If a bit is set, the element is present in the combination.

So you simply have to enumarte all numbers from 1 to 2^N-1 (from 0000001, last element present till 1111111, all elements present), and will represent a possible combination.