PHP Array Combinations

You are given an array of 7 numbers (1,2,3,4,5,6,7). The goal is to find all possible combinations of 5 numbers from that array. Each combination must be unique, meaning that no duplicates are allowed. For example, (1,2,3,4,5) and (5,4,3,2,1) are considered the same combination.

Solution

One possible solution involves using the Combinations class, which implements the Iterator interface and provides a way to iterate over all possible combinations of the given numbers. Here's how it works:

class Combinations implements Iterator
{
    protected $c = null; // Combination of numbers
    protected $s = null; // Source array
    protected $n = 0; // Number of elements in the array
    protected $k = 0; // Number of elements in each combination
    protected $pos = 0; // Current position of the iterator

    function __construct($s, $k) {
        // Initialize the class properties
        if(is_array($s)) {
            $this->s = array_values($s);
            $this->n = count($this->s);
        } else {
            $this->s = (string) $s;
            $this->n = strlen($this->s);
        }
        $this->k = $k;
        $this->rewind();
    }

    // Return the current key
    function key() {
        return $this->pos;
    }

    // Return the current value
    function current() {
        $r = array();
        for($i = 0; $i k; $i  )
            $r[] = $this->s[$this->c[$i]];
        return is_array($this->s) ? $r : implode('', $r);
    }

    // Move to the next combination
    function next() {
        if($this->_next())
            $this->pos  ;
        else
            $this->pos = -1;
    }

    // Rewind to the first combination
    function rewind() {
        $this->c = range(0, $this->k);
        $this->pos = 0;
    }

    // Check if the iterator is valid (at a valid position)
    function valid() {
        return $this->pos >= 0;
    }

    // Move to the next combination (internal function)
    protected function _next() {
        $i = $this->k - 1;
        while ($i >= 0 && $this->c[$i] == $this->n - $this->k   $i)
            $i--;
        if($i c[$i]  ;
        while($i   k - 1)
            $this->c[$i] = $this->c[$i - 1]   1;
        return true;
    }
}

// Create a Combinations object for the given array and number of elements per combination
$combinations = new Combinations("1234567", 5);

// Iterate over all possible combinations and print them out
foreach($combinations as $substring)
    echo $substring, ' ';

This code produces the following output:

12345 12346 12347 12356 12357 12367 12456 12457 12467 12567 13456 13457 13467 13567 14567 23456 23457 23467 23567 24567 34567