What is the purpose of permutating a list in PHP, and what are some best practices for achieving this?

Permutating a list in PHP means rearranging the elements of the list in all possible orders. This can be useful for generating all possible combinations of a set of items or for solving certain algorithmic problems. One common way to permute a list in PHP is to use recursion to generate all possible permutations.

function permute($items, $permutation = []) {
    if (empty($items)) {
        print_r($permutation);
    } else {
        for ($i = count($items) - 1; $i >= 0; $i--) {
            $newItems = $items;
            $newPermutation = $permutation;
            list($item) = array_splice($newItems, $i, 1);
            array_unshift($newPermutation, $item);
            permute($newItems, $newPermutation);
        }
    }
}

$items = [1, 2, 3];
permute($items);