I'm trying to use itertools.combinations to return unique combinations. I've searched through several similar questions but have not been able to find an answer.
An example:
>>> import itertools
>>> e = ['r','g','b','g']
>>> list(itertools.combinations(e,3))
[('r', 'g', 'b'), ('r', 'g', 'g'), ('r', 'b', 'g'), ('g', 'b', 'g')]
For my purposes, (r,g,b) is identical to (r,b,g) and so I would want to return only (rgb),(rgg) and (gbg).
This is just an illustrative example and I would want to ignore all such 'duplicates'. The list e could contain up to 5 elements. Each individual element would be either r, g or b. Always looking for combinations of 3 elements from e.
To be concrete, the following are the only combinations I wish to call 'valid': (rrr), (ggg), (bbb), (rgb).
So perhaps the question boils down to how to treat any variation of (rgb) as equal to (rgb) and therefore ignore it.
Can I use itertools to achieve this or do I need to write my own code to drop the 'dupliates' here? If no itertools solution then I can just easily check if each is a variation of (rgb), but this feels a bit 'un-pythonic'.
According to your definition of "valid outputs", you can directly build them like this:
from collections import Counter
# Your distinct values
values = ['r', 'g', 'b']
e = ['r','g','b','g', 'g']
count = Counter(e)
# Counter({'g': 3, 'r': 1, 'b': 1})
# If x appears at least 3 times, 'xxx' is a valid combination
combinations = [x*3 for x in values if count[x] >=3]
# If all values appear at least once, 'rgb' is a valid combination
if all([count[x]>=1 for x in values]):
combinations.append('rgb')
print(combinations)
#['ggg', 'rgb']
This will be more efficient than creating all possible combinations and filtering the valid ones afterwards.