[Tutor] All possible 16 character alphanumeric strings?

[akleider at sonic.net]

#!/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


> That solution is really nice, thanks, I doubt I would've come up with
> something as nice. What I'll do is have that write to a file then use
> regex
> to strip out any characters like whitespace or commas from the list and
> that should give me a good solid list, no?
>
> I'm using this to write a program I'm calling TORdialer with the goal of
> attempting to basically ping all possible TOR hidden service pages with
> the
> goal of having an absolutely complete list of all TOR hidden services on
> the net right now. Unfortunately it will probably be a lot of fucked up CP
> sites and drug related marketplaces. I'm mostly interested in the sites
> that aren't publicized (ie- government related sites, etc).
> Thanks for your help and I'll try to keep everyone posted.
>

There won't be any whitespace or commas in any of the derived output.
For your purposes, you might want to make this into a generator although
that would be getting too sophisticated for me to help you.
Since in its present form the algorithm is a recursive one, I'm guessing
it'll run out of memory long before it comes to completion although I
haven't let it run for more than a few seconds, just enough to see that it
seemed to be doing what I wanted.
>From what I know about computer science, I believe that most if not all
recursive algorithms can be re-written to be non recursive. If you could
do that, you could then make a generator and presumably make use of it
without overwhelming resources.
I look forward to hearing what those with more expertise might have to say
about that.