How To Get All The Contiguous Substrings Of A String In Python?

The only improvement I could think of is, to use list comprehension like this

def get_all_substrings(input_string):
  length = len(input_string)
  return [input_string[i:j+1] for i in xrange(length) for j in xrange(i,length)]

print get_all_substrings('abcde')

The timing comparison between, yours and mine

def get_all_substrings(string):
  length = len(string)
  alist = []
  for i in xrange(length):
    for j in xrange(i,length):
      alist.append(string[i:j + 1]) 
  return alist

def get_all_substrings_1(input_string):
  length = len(input_string)
  return [input_string[i:j + 1] for i in xrange(length) for j in xrange(i,length)]

from timeit import timeit
print timeit("get_all_substrings('abcde')", "from __main__ import get_all_substrings")
# 3.33308315277
print timeit("get_all_substrings_1('abcde')", "from __main__ import get_all_substrings_1")
# 2.67816185951

can be done concisely with itertools.combinations

from itertools import combinations

def get_all_substrings_2(string):
    length = len(string) + 1
    return [string[x:y] for x, y in combinations(range(length), r=2)]

You could write it as a generator to save storing all the strings in memory at once if you don't need to

def get_all_substrings(string):
    length = len(string)
    for i in xrange(length):
        for j in xrange(i + 1, length + 1):
            yield(string[i:j]) 

for i in get_all_substrings("abcde"):
    print i

you can still make a list if you really need one

alist = list(get_all_substrings("abcde"))

The function can be reduced to return a generator expression

def get_all_substrings(s):
    length = len(s)
    return (s[i: j] for i in xrange(length) for j in xrange(i + 1, length + 1))

Or of course you can change two characters to return a list if you don't care about memory

def get_all_substrings(s):
    length = len(s)
    return [s[i: j] for i in xrange(length) for j in xrange(i + 1, length + 1)]