Here's the source code to a Visual Basic project I originally wrote on June 06, 2005 called "Word Combination Maker". This is somewhat similar to my Word Combiner program. This program has to do with string permutations (or rather the permutations of words). It takes a series of words and it can tell you all the different possible ways those words can be re-arranged. Here's an example, let's say I type "A B C". This is composed of 3 individual words (A, B, and C). This can be arranged 6 different ways: "ABC, ACB, BAC, BCA, CAB, CBA". Well that's easy to understand but what about for 4 words, or 5 words? There's a lot more combinations as the number of words grow (it grows exponentially in fact). It can get pretty complicated by hand, so that's why I wrote this program. It would probably be most useful for people advertising on PPC advertising programs like Google Adwords because it allows you to pick out certain keywords and phrases that you can bid on "exactly". All the different ways of combining a series of words can be found with this program. Feedback and comments are welcome.

Download word_combination_maker.zip (June 06, 2005)

Filelist
 Form1.frm
 Module1.bas

'Generates all possible combinations from a series of words
Public Function PermutateString(ByVal input_string As String, Optional Base As String = "") As String
 Dim i As Long
 Dim TmpStrArray() As String
 'If there's only 1 element, then
 If InStr(1, input_string, " ", vbTextCompare) = 0 Then
  PermutateString = Base & " " & input_string & vbCrLf
  Exit Function
 End If
 'If more than 1 element, split elements in one array of elements
 TmpStrArray = Split(input_string, " ", , vbTextCompare)
 If Base = "" Then
  'Loop trough each element and do callbacks to permutate again
  For i = LBound(TmpStrArray) To UBound(TmpStrArray)
   PermutateString = PermutateString & PermutateString(ReturnAllBut(TmpStrArray, i), TmpStrArray(i))
  Next
 Else
  'Loop trough each element and do callbacks to permutate again
  For i = LBound(TmpStrArray) To UBound(TmpStrArray)
   PermutateString = PermutateString & PermutateString(ReturnAllBut(TmpStrArray, i), Base & " " & TmpStrArray(i))
  Next
 End If
End Function

'Return all items in a array but 1
Public Function ReturnAllBut(ByRef strArray() As String, But As Long) As String
 Dim i As Long
 For i = LBound(strArray) To UBound(strArray)
  If i <> But Then
   ReturnAllBut = ReturnAllBut & strArray(i) & " "
  End If
 Next
 ReturnAllBut = RTrim(ReturnAllBut)
End Function