A Collection is used to represent a set of similar data items as a single unit that is used to group and manage related objects.
They contain data structures that are used to manipulate and store data efficiently. Python collections module provides a lot of data structures to implement different types of collections.
The following are the types of Collections that we’ll be looking at in this article:
OrderedDictdefaultdictcounternamedtupledequeChainMap
1.1. OrderedDict
Python OrderedDict maintains the order of insertion of elements through the key-value pairs in the Dictionary. If the user tries to insert a key again, it overwrites the previous value for that key. In OrderedDict, the order of items is strictly maintained i.e. the order of the elements served as output would be the same as the order of insertion of elements.
Example:
Output:
1.2. DefaultDict
DefaultDict in python is a container in the collection class. It is similar to the Dictionary container, the only difference is that a defaultdict will have a default value if the key is not set. Thus, we can group items belonging to the same key.
Example:
Output:
The key – Safa was used twice and the values associated with it were collected altogether when printed.
1.3. Counter
The Counter Collections keep a count of all the elements inserted in the collection along with the keys. It is a sub-class of Dictionary and used to track the items.
Example:
Output:
1.4. Named Tuple
Namedtuple enables the user to provide names/tags to the elements. Thus, making the element accessible by index value or by name.
Hence, it enhances the readability of the code and is immutable.
Example:
Le’ts create a Tuple in Python.
Output:
For better readability and understanding, we can create Named Tuple by assigning names to the items present in the Tuple.
Example:
Output:
1.5. Deque
Deque is a double-ended queue that allows the user to add and delete elements from both the ends. It adds and enhances to the capabilities and functionalities of a stack or a queue.
Example:
Output:
1.6. ChainMap
ChainMap returns a chain/list of dictionaries and represent it as a single view mapping. ChainMap works well when there are different dictionaries with several key-value pairs in it, in such case, ChainMap represents them as a Single list/structure of all the dictionaries.
Example:
from collections import ChainMap
x = { 1: 'Engineering' , 2: 'Medical'}
y = {3: 'Analytics' , 4: 'Python'}
z = ChainMap(x,y)
print(z)
Output:
References
- Python Collections
- Python Collections Docs