fellow monks,

As a personal exercise, I am interested in building a script that will generate all possible combinations of a defined set of characters. The string length is a user provided option. I put together a solution to this problem; although it works, I believe there is a better way to accomplish the desired result. As an example, here's what I've come up with.

#!perlenv -w

use strict;

if($#ARGV <1) { 
print <<EOF;
usage: char-gen <charSetNum> <stringLength>
charSetNum 1 = 
a b c 

charSetNum 2 = 
a b c
1 2 3 

charSetNum 3 = 
a b c 
1 2 3
! @ #

EOF
die();
} 


my @charsSetOne = qw/ a b c /;
my @charsSetTwo = qw/ a b c 1 2 3 /;
my @charsSetThree = split // , q'abc123!@#';

my @chars;

if ( $ARGV[0] == 1) {
    @chars = @charsSetOne;
    }
elsif ( $ARGV[0] == 2) {
    @chars = @charsSetTwo;
    }
elsif ( $ARGV[0] == 3) {
    @chars = @charsSetThree;
    }


my @charsOne = @chars;
my @charsTwo = @chars;
my @charsThree = @chars;

my $charsOne;
my $charsTwo;
my $charsThree;


my @charSetNum = $ARGV[0];
my $stringLength = $ARGV[1];



if ( $stringLength >= 1) {

for $charsOne (@charsOne) {
    print $charsOne . "\n";
}
}



if ( $stringLength >= 2) {

foreach $charsOne (@charsOne) {
        foreach $charsTwo (@charsTwo) {
            print $charsOne;
            print $charsTwo . "\n";
        }            
}
}



if ($stringLength >= 3) {
foreach $charsOne (@charsOne) {
        foreach $charsTwo (@charsTwo) {
            foreach $charsThree (@charsThree) {
                print $charsOne;
                print $charsTwo;
                print $charsThree . "\n";
            }            
        }
}
}
[download]

My concern is with how I'm handling the user provided option for stringLength. In this example, I'm building nested foreach loops to handle the stringLength option. My question is: how would others approach this? As always, comments, critiques and suggestions for improvement are always welcome.

cheers, semio

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