Meaningless Arrangements

September 22, 2016 10:40 AM

I'm looking for something that will take a given set of letters and display all possible arrangements of those letters. All I can find are anagram servers, which is NOT what I want, because they only serve up real words. I don't care if the words are real or not. I'm only interested in strings about 5 characters long, so it's ok if the tool limits my input so as to avoid having to calculate "10!" (which would be over 3.6 million results). Does such a tool exist?
posted by paperback version to Writing & Language (7 answers total)

Best answer: It sounds like you want something like this permutation generator, or potentially the similar but meaningfully different combination generator. (For the former, just use a different letter as each "Object").
posted by tocts at 10:44 AM on September 22, 2016 [2 favorites]

Response by poster: YES, thank you!
posted by paperback version at 10:49 AM on September 22, 2016

Here's another permutation generator.
posted by DevilsAdvocate at 10:51 AM on September 22, 2016

Hmm looks like you're already happy and have a solution. I just wanted to pop in and say that doing things like this is pretty easy in code too, and you probably already have everything you need on your local computer to do it without the internet. For example, in python:

> python
Python 2.7.11 (default, Dec 5 2015, 14:44:47)
[GCC 4.2.1 Compatible Apple LLVM 7.0.0 (clang-700.1.76)] on darwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> from itertools import permutations
>>> from __future__ import print_function
>>> word = "fish"
>>> r = map(print, (''.join(p) for p in permutations(word)))
fish
fihs
fsih
fshi
fhis
fhsi
ifsh
ifhs
isfh
ishf
ihfs
ihsf
sfih
sfhi
sifh
sihf
shfi
shif
hfis
hfsi
hifs
hisf
hsfi
hsif

You can just change the value of word.
posted by doteatop at 10:53 AM on September 22, 2016 [7 favorites]

adhesion text is another site that does this.
posted by Cranialtorque at 11:05 AM on September 22, 2016

WolframAlpha will do it too. I typed in

list all permutations of {a,f,g,h,k}
posted by leahwrenn at 7:37 PM on September 22, 2016

Somebody turned Borges' Library of Babel into a videogame.
posted by Charlemagne In Sweatpants at 8:54 PM on September 22, 2016