finds all possible permutations of a certain numbers of distinct digits

Question

I am stuck on the following problem. I want to find an algorithm that finds all possible permutations of a certain numbers of distinct digits and then put them in a large matrix for instance. For instance for the digits 0, 1 and 2 I want to get the matrix:

2 1 2 0 1 0
1 2 0 2 0 1
0 0 1 1 2 2

Here they are in order but this is not required per se. Does anyone know a nice algorithm to achieve this? Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Building on MichaelT's comment, here's an example solution in Python:

from itertools import permutations
for p in permutations(['0', '1', '2'], 3):
    print p

Output looks like this:

('0', '1', '2')
('0', '2', '1')
('1', '0', '2')
('1', '2', '0')
('2', '0', '1')
('2', '1', '0')

You'll have to arrange the output to match your desired format.