[Tutor] All possible 16 character alphanumeric strings?

[akleider at sonic.net]

> Hello again python tutor list.
> I have what I see as a somewhat complicated problem which I have no idea
> where to begin. I'm hoping you fine folks can help me.
>
> I'm trying to generate a list of every possible 16 character string
> containing only 2-7 and a-z lowercase. I've seen some examples using regex
> to define which characters I want to use but not a way to generate the
> complete list of all possibilities. I'm not looking for a handout- just a
> point in the right direction.
>
> Any information would be awesome, thanks.
>
> Right now I've got something like:
>
> import random
>>>> ''.join(random.choice('234567abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz') for i in
>>>> range(16))
>
> Which only prints 1 number, obviously.
>
> or possibly something like this:
>
>
> def genKey():
>     hash = hashlib.md5(RANDOM_NUMBER).digest().encode("base32")
>     alnum_hash = re.sub(r'[^a-z2-7]', "", hash)
>     return alnum_hash[:16]
>
>
> Keeping in mind that although I understand this code, I did not write it,
> I
> got it from stackoverflow.
>
> Again any help would be great. Feel free to ask if you must know exactly
> what I'm trying to do.
>
> I'm running Ubuntu 12.04 and python 2.7
>
> Scott

This seems to work:
#!/usr/bin/env python

# file :  every.py
print 'Running "every.py"'

possible = "234567abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz"
word_length = 16

word_list = []
def add_word(word):
    if len(word)==word_length:
        word_list.append(word)
        print word   # There may come a time you won't want this line.
    else:
        for c in possible:
            new_word = word + c
            add_word(new_word)

add_word("")

# print word_list