Do you want iteration? itertools.combinations. Common usage:
>>> import itertools
>>> itertools.combinations('abcd',2)
<itertools.combinations object at 0x01348F30>
>>> list(itertools.combinations('abcd',2))
[('a', 'b'), ('a', 'c'), ('a', 'd'), ('b', 'c'), ('b', 'd'), ('c', 'd')]
>>> [''.join(x) for x in itertools.combinations('abcd',2)]
['ab', 'ac', 'ad', 'bc', 'bd', 'cd']
If you just need to compute the formula, use math.factorial:
import math
def nCr(n,r):
f = math.factorial
return f(n) / f(r) / f(n-r)
if __name__ == '__main__':
print nCr(4,2)
In Python 3, use the integer division // instead of / to avoid overflows:
return f(n) // f(r) // f(n-r)
6