How to generate permutations in JavaScript?

#javascript #permutations #algorithms #problem

Generating permutations is pretty common problem in many algorithmic problems.

I have already implemented this problem, so you can find it in my github in algorithms repo.

Here you have function that is generating permutations from Set of specified size.
https://github.com/gkucmierz/algorithms/blob/master/js/generate_permutations.js

So if you pass 3 to it you will get this 2d array:

console.log(genPermutations(3));

[
  [
    0,
    1,
    2
  ],
  [
    0,
    2,
    1
  ],
  [
    1,
    0,
    2
  ],
  [
    1,
    2,
    0
  ],
  [
    2,
    0,
    1
  ],
  [
    2,
    1,
    0
  ]
]

Subarrays are indexed from 0 to 2, so you can very easily adapt it to your code using these indexes.

const map = ['a', 'b', 'c'];

console.log(
  genPermutations(3)
    .map(permutation => {
      return permutation.map(idx => map[idx]).join('')
    })
);

[
  'abc',
  'acb',
  'bac',
  'bca',
  'cab',
  'cba'
]