Basic knowledge of combinatorics is essential for all software test engineers. A mathematical combination is a subset of a collection of items where order doesn’t matter. A mathematical permutation is a rearrangement of a collection of items. It is very useful to be able to programmatically manipulate combinations and permutations. Today I was pretty much blocked waiting for some hardware to arrive from Dell, and waiting for some phone messages to be returned, so I decided  to poke around combinatorics with PowerShell. The screenshot beloiw shows that I succeeded in getting a crude set of combination functions working. Because PowerShell is a scripting language it doesn’t support classes or structures, so I had to use global variables for n (the total number of items in the collection), k (the subset size), and values (an array to hold a combination element). Here is the main() function I used:

 

# demo.ps1
# string combinations with PowerShell

function main
{
  write-host "`nbegin combinations with PowerShell demo`n"

  $data = ("ant","bat","cow","dog","elk","fox","gnu")
  write-host "Initial data is: $data `n"

  makeCombination 7 3 $data

  for ($i = 0; $i -le 34; $i++) {
    if ($i -lt 10 ) { write-host " " -nonewline }
    write-host "[$i] " -nonewline
    displayCombination
    incrementCombination
  }
   
  write-host "`nend combinations with PowerShell demo`n"
}

 

And here is the rather messy makeCombination() method:

 

function makeCombination($n,$k,[string[]]$d)
{
  $script:nVal = 0
  $script:kVal = 0
  $script:values = @()

  $script:all = @() # save all original strings
  $script:id  = @{} # hash table of original string ids

  if ($d.length -ne $n) {
    throw "Incorrect data array size: array size must equal n"
  }
  else {
    $script:nVal = $n
    $script:kVal = $k

    $script:values = new-object string[] $k
    for ($i = 0; $i -lt $k; $i++) {
      $script:values[$i] = $d[$i]
    }

    # save all strings
    $script:all = new-object string[] $n
    for ($i = 0; $i -lt $d.length; $i++) {
      $script:all[$i] = $d[$i]
    }

    # the ‘id’ of each string
    for ($i = 0; $i -lt $d.length; $i++) {
      $script:id[$d[$i]] += $i
    }
  } # else
} # makeCombination()

 

Anyway, it was a good exercise that taught me a few things about PowerShell syntax, and supported my notion that PowerShell makes an excellent base-language for lightweight software test automation.