Python sets and frozensets

A Python set is like a dictionary, but without a value being held.

Quite often, I'll have a long list of names / places / skills / words and I want to make up a unique list - to produce a pulldown menu, for example, in which each occurs just once.

I could do that with a dictionary - either storing the value "1" into each pair's value as I add pairs to the dictionary, or by keeping an arbitary count of the number of times each name / place / skill / word appears, in the full knowledge that I won't actually be using the count. Example [here].

A much better solution is to use a set; A set is an unordered collection of keys, held without any values. If I use the add method on a set, a new element will indeed be added if the key requested is new, but there will be no change if the item is an already existing key.

Here's an example of the use of a set - to get me a unique list of places served in a list of public transport routes:

  records = """London Rugby Coventry Birmingham Wolverhampton

  Derby Birmingham Cheltenham Gloucester Bristol Taunton

  London Reading Swindon Stroud Gloucester Cheltenham

  London Reading Swindon Chippenham Bath Bristol Weston-super-Mare"""

 

  locations = set()

 

  for record in records.splitlines():

    for place in record.split():

      locations.add(place)

 

  print locations

Running that, I get:

  wizard:oct11 graham$ python pyset

  set(['Cheltenham', 'Wolverhampton', 'Rugby', 'Coventry', 'Stroud', 

  'Weston-super-Mare', 'Chippenham', 'Taunton', 'Bath', 'London', 

  'Bristol', 'Derby', 'Birmingham', 'Reading', 'Swindon', 'Gloucester'])

  wizard:oct11 graham$

So that's a unique list of all the places, but in no particular order. Full source [here].

My set is itereable - in other words I can use it as the incoming "list" to a for loop, I can use the keyword in to check whether an element exists, and I can use the len() function to find how many elements there are in my set ...

A frozenset is an immutable set - it's set up with the frozenset() function call, but once it's set up its contents cannot be altered. Operations which are non-intrusive (i.e. read only) work on a frozenset in the same way that they work on sets, but of course anything that writes to / modifies a set can't be used on a frozenset.

A Python set is similar to a Java HashSet - example [here]. And to complete that Java comparison, a python dictionary is similar to a java HashMap or Hashtable.
(written 2011-10-20) 2433

Associated topics are indexed under

Y107 - Python - Dictionaries
  [4029] Exception, Lambda, Generator, Slice, Dict - examples in one Python program - (2013-03-04)
  [4027] Collections in Python - list tuple dict and string. - (2013-03-04)
  [3934] Multiple identical keys in a Python dict - yes, you can! - (2012-11-24)
  [3662] Finding all the unique lines in a file, using Python or Perl - (2012-03-20)
  [3555] Football league tables - under old and new point system. Python program. - (2011-12-18)
  [3554] Learning more about our web site - and learning how to learn about yours - (2011-12-17)
  [3464] Passing optional and named parameters to python methods - (2011-10-04)
  [2994] Python - some common questions answered in code examples - (2010-10-10)
  [2986] Python dictionaries - reaching to new uses - (2010-10-05)
  [2915] Looking up a value by key - associative arrays / Hashes / Dictionaries - (2010-08-11)
  [2368] Python - fresh examples of all the fundamentals - (2009-08-20)
  [1145] Using a list of keys and a list of values to make a dictionary in Python - zip - (2007-04-13)
  [1144] Python dictionary for quick look ups - (2007-04-12)
  [955] Python collections - mutable and imutable - (2006-11-29)
  [103] Can't resist writing about Python - (2004-10-29)

Back to
Public transport - road and rail

Previous and next
or
Horse's mouth home

Forward to
Python courses and Private courses - gently updating our product to keep it ahead of the game

Some other Articles

Upcoming events in and about Melksham - more dates for your diary
Who is knocking at your web site door? Are you well set up to deal with allcomers?
How not to call when job seeking ...
Python courses and Private courses - gently updating our product to keep it ahead of the game
Python sets and frozensets - what are they?
Public transport - road and rail
How important is public transport to people in the Melksham area?
Perl - retrieving and caching web resources
A Melksham Timeline - Domesday to present day
Canals, watererways in the Melksham area

4084 posts, page by page

Link to page ... 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82 at 50 posts per page

This is a page archived from The Horse's Mouth at http://www.wellho.net/horse/ - the diary and writings of Graham Ellis. Every attempt was made to provide current information at the time the page was written, but things do move forward in our business - new software releases, price changes, new techniques. Please check back via our main site for current courses, prices, versions, etc - any mention of a price in "The Horse's Mouth" cannot be taken as an offer to supply at that price.

Link to Ezine home page (for reading).
Link to Blogging home page (to add comments).