Generating all distinct permutations of a list in R

A while back I had to do this in base R without loading any packages.

permutations <- function(n){
    if(n==1){
        return(matrix(1))
    } else {
        sp <- permutations(n-1)
        p <- nrow(sp)
        A <- matrix(nrow=n*p,ncol=n)
        for(i in 1:n){
            A[(i-1)*p+1:p,] <- cbind(i,sp+(sp>=i))
        }
        return(A)
    }
}

Usage:

> matrix(letters[permutations(3)],ncol=3)
     [,1] [,2] [,3]
[1,] "a"  "b"  "c" 
[2,] "a"  "c"  "b" 
[3,] "b"  "a"  "c" 
[4,] "b"  "c"  "a" 
[5,] "c"  "a"  "b" 
[6,] "c"  "b"  "a" 

combinat::permn will do that work:

> library(combinat)
> permn(letters[1:3])
[[1]]
[1] "a" "b" "c"

[[2]]
[1] "a" "c" "b"

[[3]]
[1] "c" "a" "b"

[[4]]
[1] "c" "b" "a"

[[5]]
[1] "b" "c" "a"

[[6]]
[1] "b" "a" "c"

Note that calculation is huge if the element is large.

base R can also provide the answer:

all <- expand.grid(p1 = letters[1:3], p2 = letters[1:3], p3 = letters[1:3], stringsAsFactors = FALSE) 
perms <- all[apply(all, 1, function(x) {length(unique(x)) == 3}),]

You can try permutations() from the gtools package, but unlike permn() from combinat, it doesn't output a list:

> library(gtools)
> permutations(3, 3, letters[1:3])
     [,1] [,2] [,3]
[1,] "a"  "b"  "c" 
[2,] "a"  "c"  "b" 
[3,] "b"  "a"  "c" 
[4,] "b"  "c"  "a" 
[5,] "c"  "a"  "b" 
[6,] "c"  "b"  "a"