Separating a String

How about something like:

from itertools import combinations

def all_splits(s):
    for numsplits in range(len(s)):
        for c in combinations(range(1,len(s)), numsplits):
            split = [s[i:j] for i,j in zip((0,)+c, c+(None,))]
            yield split

after which:

>>> for x in all_splits("abcd"):
...     print(x)
...     
['abcd']
['a', 'bcd']
['ab', 'cd']
['abc', 'd']
['a', 'b', 'cd']
['a', 'bc', 'd']
['ab', 'c', 'd']
['a', 'b', 'c', 'd']

You could generate the power set of the n - 1 places that you could put commas:

what's a good way to combinate through a set?

and then insert commas in each position.

You can certainly use itertools for this, but I think it's easier to write a recursive generator directly:

def gen_commas(s):
    yield s
    for prefix_len in range(1, len(s)):
        prefix = s[:prefix_len]
        for tail in gen_commas(s[prefix_len:]):
            yield prefix + "," + tail

Then

print list(gen_commas("abcd"))

prints

['abcd', 'a,bcd', 'a,b,cd', 'a,b,c,d', 'a,bc,d', 'ab,cd', 'ab,c,d', 'abc,d']

I'm not sure why I find this easier. Maybe just because it's dead easy to do it directly ;-)

Using itertools:

import itertools
input_str =  "abcd"
for k in range(1,len(input_str)):
    for subset in itertools.combinations(range(1,len(input_str)), k): 
        s = list(input_str)
        for i,x in enumerate(subset): s.insert(x+i, ",")
        print "".join(s)

Gives:

a,bcd
ab,cd
abc,d
a,b,cd
a,bc,d
ab,c,d
a,b,c,d

Also a recursive version:

def commatoze(s,p=1):
    if p == len(s):
        print s
        return
    commatoze(s[:p] + ',' + s[p:], p + 2)
    commatoze(s, p + 1)

input_str =  "abcd"
commatoze(input_str)