README.md

steinhaus-johnson-trotter

A JavaScript implementation of the Steinhaus-Johnson-Trotter algorithm with Even's speedup to generate the permutations of a string or an array.

Usage

var permutations = require('steinhaus-johnson-trotter');

var generate = permutations("123");

console.log(generate()); // → '132'
console.log(generate()); // → '312'
console.log(generate()); // → '321'
console.log(generate()); // → '231'
console.log(generate()); // → '213'
console.log(generate()); // → undefined

permutations returns a function which returns another permutation each time is is invoked. If all permutations are generated it returns undefined. The source is never included in the permutations returned, i.e. the number of invocations that the generator returns a permutation is N! - 1 where N is the length of the array/string.

All permutations can be generated as follows:

var sjt = require('steinhaus-johnson-trotter');

function permutations(arr) {
  var generator = sjt(arr);
  var next = arr;
  var result = [];
  while (next !== undefined) {
    result.push(next);
    next = generator();
  }
  return result;
}

The above function is also exported as all:

var permutations = require('steinhaus-johnson-trotter');

console.log(permutations.all([ 1, 4, 7 ]));

/* → [ [ 1, 4, 7 ],
       [ 1, 7, 4 ],
       [ 7, 1, 4 ],
       [ 7, 4, 1 ],
       [ 4, 7, 1 ],
       [ 4, 1, 7 ] ] */