How to implement brute force pause/resume with Python?

Question

I found the following code to be used for brute forcing -

import itertools

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

for attempt in bruteforce('ab', 10):
    # do something

But I would like to have it more smart - be able to pause and to start from the particular attempt.

I am reading the similar question and answers there - Using itertools.product and want to seed a value - but can not understand how to apply make_product used there to my case.

If I understand you corerctly, you want to stop brute forcing and later continue where you stopped. The `itertools` functions should return iterators. If you assign this iterator to a variable, you can iterate over it, break out of the loop if you need to and start iterating over it again once you need to. — ConfusedProgrammer, Sep 23 '14 at 14:57

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Sep 30 '14 at 14:17

I found that the easiest way to implement it is to use numbers and then convert them to 36-based numeral system. For ex., 806031402130 is equal to aaaaaaaa and 229927546474 is equal to 2xmkxaay. So, it is easy to keep the state by keeping the numeric value.

How to implement brute force pause/resume with Python?

1 Answers1