cartesian-product

Ruby's Enumerable.product materializes the entire cartesian product of a sequence of arrays into an array of arrays, so a call like:

[(0..100).to_a, (0..100).to_a, (0..100).to_a].reduce(&:product).map(&:flatten)

actually returns an array of a million elements. This module implements an iterator over the cartesian product of an arbitrary number of arrays, allowing you to start and stop at a particular index in the lexicographic ordering without ever representing the cartesian product in memory.

Quick examples:

>> prod = CartesianProduct.new([1,2], [100,101], ['a','b'])
>> prod.each { |element| puts element }

[1, 100, 'a']
[1, 100, 'b']
[1, 101, 'a']
[1, 101, 'b']
[2, 100, 'a']
[2, 100, 'b']
[2, 101, 'a']
[2, 101, 'b']

>> prod.each(0, 2) { |element| puts element }

[1, 100, 'a']
[1, 100, 'b']

>> prod.each(4, 7) { |element| puts element }

[2, 100, 'a']
[2, 100, 'b']
[2, 101, 'a']

>> prod.each(-3, -1) { |element| puts element }

[2, 100, 'b']
[2, 101, 'a']
[2, 101, 'b']

Installation

gem install cartesian-product