My goal is to find all possible combinations of items in an ArrayList with a fixed predefined length. For example, if my ArrayList is called arr and contains <1, 2, 3> then the desired output for the predefined size r = 2 will be:
<1,2>
<1,3>
<2,3>
Here is code I found which prints the desired output. My problem is that I need to define a return value type ArrayList which holds the outputs from the method. Besides, my input type is also an ArrayList<Integer>, instead of an Array, which has made it more complicated for me because then I first will need to convert the values to the primitive type int.
import java.io.*;
class Permutation {
/* arr[] ---> Input Array
data[] ---> Temporary array to store current combination
start & end ---> Staring and Ending indexes in arr[]
index ---> Current index in data[]
r ---> Size of a combination to be printed */
static void combinationUtil(int arr[], int data[], int start,
int end, int index, int r)
{
// Current combination is ready to be printed, print it
if (index == r)
{
for (int j=0; j<r; j++)
System.out.print(data[j]+" ");
System.out.println("");
return;
}
// replace index with all possible elements. The condition
// "end-i+1 >= r-index" makes sure that including one element
// at index will make a combination with remaining elements
// at remaining positions
for (int i=start; i<=end && end-i+1 >= r-index; i++)
{
data[index] = arr[i];
combinationUtil(arr, data, i+1, end, index+1, r);
}
}
// The main function that prints all combinations of size r
// in arr[] of size n. This function mainly uses combinationUtil()
static void printCombination(int arr[], int n, int r)
{
// A temporary array to store all combination one by one
int data[]=new int[r];
// Print all combination using temprary array 'data[]'
combinationUtil(arr, data, 0, n-1, 0, r);
}
/*Driver function to check for above function*/
public static void main (String[] args) {
int arr[] = {1, 2, 3, 4, 5};
int r = 3;
int n = arr.length;
printCombination(arr, n, r);
}
}
/* This code is contributed by Devesh Agrawal */