sentence creation function

I have the following function:

      public ArrayList<ArrayList<Word>> createSentences(ArrayList<ArrayList<Word>> gestures, int startIndex) {
            if (gestures.size() == 1) {

                return gestures;
            }


            ArrayList<Word> ret;
            ArrayList<ArrayList<Word>> result = new ArrayList<ArrayList<Word>>();

            ArrayList<Word> tmp1 = gestures.get(0);
            gestures.remove(0);
            ArrayList<ArrayList<Word>> tmp2 = createS开发者_开发技巧entences(gestures, startIndex + 1);


            for (Word s : tmp1) {
                for (Word s2 : tmp2.get(0)) {
                    ret = new ArrayList<Word>();
                    ret.add(s);
                    ret.add(s2);
                    result.add(ret);


                }


            }


 return result;
    }

Given an input:

ArrayList<ArrayList<Word>> test= new ArrayList<ArrayList<Word>>();

        ArrayList<Word> gest1 = new ArrayList<Word>();
        gest1.add(new Word("A", "N"));
        gest1.add(new Word("B", "V"));

         ArrayList<Word> gest2 = new ArrayList<Word>();
        gest2.add(new Word("C", "N"));
        gest2.add(new Word("D", "V"));



        test.add(gest1);
        test.add(gest2);

It produces following results:

[A, C]
[A, D]
[B, C]
[B, D]

which is fine but given an input:

ArrayList<ArrayList<Word>> test= new ArrayList<ArrayList<Word>>();

        ArrayList<Word> gest1 = new ArrayList<Word>();
        gest1.add(new Word("A", "N"));
        gest1.add(new Word("B", "V"));

         ArrayList<Word> gest2 = new ArrayList<Word>();
        gest2.add(new Word("C", "N"));
        gest2.add(new Word("D", "V"));

         ArrayList<Word> gest3 = new ArrayList<Word>();
        gest3.add(new Word("E", "N"));
        gest3.add(new Word("F", "V"));

        test.add(gest1);
        test.add(gest2);
        test.add(gest3);

It produces:

[A, C]
[A, E]
[B, C]
[B, E]

where I would like to achieve all possible combinations of matching like this:

[A, C, E]
[A, C, F]
[A, D, E]
[A, D, F]
[B, C, E]
[B, C, F]
[B, D, E]
[B, D, F]

Can somebody help me and rewrite the function to produce wanted results.

---

Nest another loop in the two that already exist.

Or use a recursive algorithm which will work for any number of input word-lists.

[EDIT]

To make it more simple for you to understand what is going on, here are a couple of suggestions:

1. Create new types like class WordList extends ArrayList<Word> {} and class Sentence extends ArrayList<Word> {} That helps to make clear what you want. The code will be more readable.

2. Add helper methods to the new types. For example, add List<Sentence> appendWords( WordList ) to Sentence to create new sentences from the original one where each has one word of the word list appended. That allows you to keep the code simple: Each method does exactly one thing.

That allows you to make the final algorithm pretty simple:

List<Sentence> result = new ArrayList<Sentence>();
result.add( new Sentence() ); // start with an empty sentence

for( WordList words : wordLists ) {
    List<Sentence> tmp = new ArrayList<Sentence>();

    for( Sentence s : result ) {
        tmp.addAll( s.appendWords( words ) );
    }

    result = tmp;
}

For each iteration of the main loop, all words of the next word list are appended to all previous results.

---

This line

for (Word s2 : tmp2.get(0)) {

means something like "for every word in the first sentence of tmp2". Why do you ignore the other sentencestmp2.get(1), tmp2.get(2), etc?

What you need is, "add every word from tmp1 to every sentence in tmp2", right?

for (Word word : tmp1) {
  for (List<Word> sentence : tmp2) {
    List<Word> tempSentence = new ArrayList<Word>();
    tempSentence.add(word);
    tempSentence.addAll(sentence);
    result.add(tempSentence);
  }
}