Question

In Problem Set 3, Problem 6A: I can't get the provided perm.py file to return anything no matter what I pass it. I have also tried pasting its code into my program... still nothing. It doesn't seem to populate a list. Should it return a list, 'items', 'handlist', or 'toret', because if so, none of these are coming out of it.

Relevant snippets from my code:

from perm import *
#I have also tried copy/pasting everything from this file into my program and calling it locally

get_perms(hand, letters_remaining)
xuniqueCombinations(hand, letters_remaining)
#before and after these calls handlist = [], toret = [], & items =[]... nothing changes.

Am I broke, or might it be the perm.py file?

Answer 1

you would need something along the lines of toret = get_perms(hand, letters_remaining) so you can store the result that is returned by the function

Answer 2

Oops. That was an obvious omission on my part. However, when that is included in the code, it still yields an empty list of " toret = [''] ".

Answer 3

I have the following to start 6A

for i in range(1,HAND_SIZE+1):
perm_list=get_perms(hand,i)

As long as the "hand" dictionary has something in it, perm_list should contain all combinations of the letters in hand starting at size 1 up to hand_size.

Answer 4

To clarify, if hand is {'a':2,'c':2,'t':2} then on the first iteration perm_list will be ['a', 'a', 'c', 'c', 't', 't'].

Answer 5

Awesome. I have movement! Will give it a shot moving forward with debugging and will reply if I get stuck again. Thanks!