Python Brute Force algorithm

If you REALLY want to brute force it, try this, but it will take you a ridiculous amount of time:

your_list = 'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz'
complete_list = []
for current in xrange(10):
    a = [i for i in your_list]
    for y in xrange(current):
        a = [x+i for i in your_list for x in a]
    complete_list = complete_list+a

On a smaller example, where list = 'ab' and we only go up to 5, this prints the following:

['a', 'b', 'aa', 'ba', 'ab', 'bb', 'aaa', 'baa', 'aba', 'bba', 'aab', 'bab', 'abb', 'bbb', 'aaaa', 'baaa', 'abaa', 'bbaa', 'aaba', 'baba', 'abba', 'bbba', 'aaab', 'baab', 'abab', 'bbab', 'aabb', 'babb', 'abbb', 'bbbb', 'aaaaa', 'baaaa', 'abaaa', 'bbaaa', 'aabaa', 'babaa', 'abbaa', 'bbbaa', 'aaaba','baaba', 'ababa', 'bbaba', 'aabba', 'babba', 'abbba', 'bbbba', 'aaaab', 'baaab', 'abaab', 'bbaab', 'aabab', 'babab', 'abbab', 'bbbab', 'aaabb', 'baabb', 'ababb', 'bbabb', 'aabbb', 'babbb', 'abbbb', 'bbbbb']

Use itertools.product, combined with itertools.chain to put the various lengths together:

from itertools import chain, product
def bruteforce(charset, maxlength):
    return (''.join(candidate)
        for candidate in chain.from_iterable(product(charset, repeat=i)
        for i in range(1, maxlength + 1)))

Demonstration:

>>> list(bruteforce('abcde', 2))
['a', 'b', 'c', 'd', 'e', 'aa', 'ab', 'ac', 'ad', 'ae', 'ba', 'bb', 'bc', 'bd', 'be', 'ca', 'cb', 'cc', 'cd', 'ce', 'da', 'db', 'dc', 'dd', 'de', 'ea', 'eb', 'ec', 'ed', 'ee']

This will efficiently produce progressively larger words with the input sets, up to length maxlength.

Do not attempt to produce an in-memory list of 26 characters up to length 10; instead, iterate over the results produced:

for attempt in bruteforce(string.ascii_lowercase, 10):
    # match it against your password, or whatever
    if matched:
        break