21. The collections module

The collections module provides additional data structure. For now, we’ll look at the deque data structure. Consider also the OrderedDict class, which is similar to a dictionary but with keys being ordered.

21.1. Deque: double-ended queues

Double-ended queues, or deques, can be useful when you need to remove elements in the order in which they were added. You can find the deque functions in the collections module.

>>> from collections import deque
>>> q = deque(range(5))
>>> q.append(5)
>>> q.appendleft(6)
>>> q 
deque([6, 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5])
>>> q.pop()
5
>>> q.popleft()
6
>>> q.rotate(3)
>>> q 
deque([2, 3, 4, 0, 1])

The reason for the usefulness of the deque is that it allows appending and popping efficiently at the beginning (to the left), as opposed to lists. As a nice side effect, you can also rotate the elements (that is, shift them to the right or left, wrapping around the ends) efficiently. Deque objects also have extend and extendleft methods, with extend working like the corresponding list method, and extendleft working analogously to appendleft. Note that the elements in the iterable used in extendleft will appear in the deque in reverse order.

21.2. Named Tuples

Sometimes, it is convenient to access to a mutable element by its names rather than an index. This is possible with the collections.namedtuple() function. Your first need to design a structure using namedtuple function. Then, you create the named tuple.

person = collections.namedtuple("FirstName", "Surname", "age")
persons = []
persons.append(person("Alain", "Delon", 32))
persons.append(person("Jean", "Gabin", 39))

You can now access to the first names of each tuple using the name attribute:

first_names = [x.name for x in persons]

21.3. todo

collections.Callable collections.Iterable collections.MutableSet collections.Container collections.Iterator collections.Counter collections.KeysView collections.OrderedDict collections.defaultdict collections.Mapping collections.Sequence collections.MappingView collections.Set collections.Hashable collections.MutableMapping collections.Sized collections.ItemsView collections.MutableSequence collections.ValuesView