How would you implement the Cartesian product of multiple arrays in JavaScript?
As an example,
cartesian([1, 2], [10, 20], [100, 200, 300])
should return
[ [1, 10, 100], [1, 10, 200], [1, 10, 300], [2, 10, 100], [2, 10, 200] ... ]
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Answer
Here is a functional solution to the problem (without any mutable variable!) using reduce
and flatten
, provided by underscore.js
:
function cartesianProductOf() { return _.reduce(arguments, function(a, b) { return _.flatten(_.map(a, function(x) { return _.map(b, function(y) { return x.concat([y]); }); }), true); }, [ [] ]); } // [[1,3,"a"],[1,3,"b"],[1,4,"a"],[1,4,"b"],[2,3,"a"],[2,3,"b"],[2,4,"a"],[2,4,"b"]] console.log(cartesianProductOf([1, 2], [3, 4], ['a']));
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Remark: This solution was inspired by http://cwestblog.com/2011/05/02/cartesian-product-of-multiple-arrays/