Generate all unique combinations from a vector with repeating elements

This questions was asked previously but only for vectors with non-repeating elements. I was not able to find an easy solution to get all combinations from a vector with repeating elements. To illustrate I listed an example below.

x <- c('red', 'blue', 'green', 'red', 'green', 'red')

Vector x has 3 repeating elements for 'red' and 2 for 'green'. The expected outcome for all unique combinations would be like this.

# unique combinations with one element
'red'
'blue'
'green'
# unique combination with two elements
'red', 'blue' # same as 'blue','red'
'red', 'green' 
'red', 'red'
'blue', 'green'
'green', 'green'
# unique combination with three elements
'red', 'blue', 'green'
'red', 'red', 'blue'
'red', 'red', 'green'
'red', 'red', 'red' # This is valid because there are three 'red's
'green', 'green', 'red'
'green', 'green', 'blue'
# more unique combinations with four, five, and six elements

Solution

Use combn() with lapply() should do the trick.

x <- c('red', 'blue', 'green', 'red', 'green', 'red')

lapply(1:3, function(y) combn(x, y))

# [[1]]
     # [,1]  [,2]   [,3]    [,4]  [,5]    [,6] 
# [1,] "red" "blue" "green" "red" "green" "red"

# [[2]]
     # [,1]   [,2]    [,3]  [,4]    [,5]  [,6]    ...
# [1,] "red"  "red"   "red" "red"   "red" "blue"  ...
# [2,] "blue" "green" "red" "green" "red" "green" ...

# [[3]]
     # [,1]    [,2]   [,3]    [,4]   [,5]    [,6]    ...
# [1,] "red"   "red"  "red"   "red"  "red"   "red"   ...
# [2,] "blue"  "blue" "blue"  "blue" "green" "green" ...
# [3,] "green" "red"  "green" "red"  "red"   "green" ...

All unique combinations

lapply(cc, function(y)
  y[,!duplicated(apply(y, 2, paste, collapse="."))]
)

[[1]]
[1] "red"   "blue"  "green"

[[2]]
     [,1]   [,2]    [,3]  [,4]    [,5]   [,6]    [,7]   
[1,] "red"  "red"   "red" "blue"  "blue" "green" "green"
[2,] "blue" "green" "red" "green" "red"  "red"   "green"

[[3]]
     [,1]    [,2]   [,3]    [,4]    [,5]    [,6]  [,7]    ...
[1,] "red"   "red"  "red"   "red"   "red"   "red" "blue"  ...
[2,] "blue"  "blue" "green" "green" "red"   "red" "green" ...
[3,] "green" "red"  "red"   "green" "green" "red" "red"   ...

Although strictly speaking those aren't all unique combinations, as some of them are permutations of each other.

Properly unique combinations

lapply(cc, function(y)
  y[,!duplicated(apply(y, 2, function(z) paste(sort(z), collapse=".")))]
)

# [[1]]
# [1] "red"   "blue"  "green"

# [[2]]
     # [,1]   [,2]    [,3]  [,4]    [,5]   
# [1,] "red"  "red"   "red" "blue"  "green"
# [2,] "blue" "green" "red" "green" "green"

# [[3]]
     # [,1]    [,2]   [,3]    [,4]    [,5]  [,6]   
# [1,] "red"   "red"  "red"   "red"   "red" "blue" 
# [2,] "blue"  "blue" "green" "green" "red" "green"
# [3,] "green" "red"  "red"   "green" "red" "green"