Built-in Data Structures in Python

 Lists, Dictionaries, Sets and Tuples

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Motivation
 We use lists in our everyday lives—we make shopping
lists, to-do lists, and mental checklists.
 Our DNA is essentially a long list of molecules in the
form of a double helix, found in the nucleus of all human
cells and all living organisms.
 Its purpose is also to store information—specifically, the
instructions that are used to construct all other cells in the
body—that we call genes .
 Given the 2.85 billion nucleotides that make up the
human genome, determining their sequencing (and thus
understanding our genetic makeup) is fundamentally a
computational problem.

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List characteristics

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Lists

 A list is a linear data structure

, meaning that its elements have
a linear ordering.
 That is, there is a first element,
a second element, and so on.
 The values that make up a list
are called its elements, or its
items

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Accessing values in a Lists

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Updating values in a Lists

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List Methods

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To create a List

• The simplest is to enclose the elements in

square brackets [ and ]:

• The elements of a list don’t have to be the

same type.

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List Methods Example

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Answer this?

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Append vs Extend

• nums.append([6,7,8]) • nums.extend([6,7,8])

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Append vs Extend
• “extend” takes a single argument, which is always
a list, and adds each of the elements of that list to
the original list.
• ”append” takes one argument, which can be any
data type, and simply adds it to the end of the list.

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List Concatenation

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List Slices

• a[start:end]
– # items start through end-1
• a[start:]
– # items start through the rest of the array
• a[:end]
– # items from the beginning through end-1
• a[:]
– # a copy of the whole array
• a[start:end:step]
– # start through not past end, by step

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List Slices Example

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List Slices Example

• Negative List Indices accesses elements from the

end of the list counting backwards. The last element
of any non-empty list is always li[-1]
>>> li= ['a', 'b', 'mpilgrim', 'z', 'example']
>>> li[-1] returns 'example'
>>> li[-3] returns 'mpilgrim‘
• Slicing Shorthand
>>> li[:3] returns ['a', 'b', 'mpilgrim']
>>> li[3:] returns ['z', 'example']
>>> li[:] returns ['a', 'b', 'mpilgrim', 'z', 'example']

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Deleting List Elements
>>> a = [-1, 1, 66.25, 333, 333, 1234.5]
>>> del a[0]
>>> a
[1, 66.25, 333, 333, 1234.5]
>>> del a[2:4]
>>> a
[1, 66.25, 1234.5]
>>> del a[:]
>>> a
[]

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Removing List Elements
• “remove” removes the first occurrence of a value
from a list.
• If the value is not found in the list it raises an
exception.
• Pop does two things: it removes the last
element of the list, and it returns the value that
it removed. Note that this is different from li[-1],
which returns a value but does not change the list,
and different from li.remove(value), which
changes the list but does not return a value.

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Removing List Elements
>>> li = ['a', 'b', 'new', 'mpilgrim', 'z', 'example', 'new',
'two', 'elements']
>>> li.remove("z")
>>> li = ['a', 'b', 'new', 'mpilgrim', 'example', 'new', 'two',
'elements']
>>> li.remove("new")
>>> li = ['a', 'b', 'mpilgrim', 'example', 'new', 'two',
'elements']
>>> li.remove("c")
Traceback (innermost last): File "<interactive input>", line 1, in ? ValueError:
list.remove(x): x not in list
>>> li.pop()
'elements'
>>> li ['a', 'b', 'mpilgrim', 'example', 'new', 'two']
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Searching List Elements
index finds the first occurrence of a value in the list and
returns the index.
>>> li = ['a', 'b', 'new', 'mpilgrim', 'z', 'example', 'new',
'two', 'elements']
>>> li.index("example")
5
>>> li.index("new")
2
>>> li.index("c")
Traceback (innermost last): File "<interactive input>", line 1, in ?
ValueError: list.index(x): x not in list
>>> "c" in li
False

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Built in List Functions

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Built in List Functions

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Iterating over Lists in Python

• For Loops

• While loop

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Iterating over Lists in Python
# You can either use loops:
squares = []
for x in range(10):
squares.append(x**2)
print squares
[0, 1, 4, 9, 16, 25, 36, 49, 64, 81]

# Or you can use list comprehensions to get

the same result:
squares = [x**2 for x in range(10)]
print squares
[0, 1, 4, 9, 16, 25, 36, 49, 64, 81]

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Iterating over Lists in Python

listOfWords = ["this","is","a","list","of","words"]
items = [ word[0] for word in listOfWords]
print (items)
Output: ['t', 'i', 'a', 'l', 'o', 'w']

string = "Hello 12345 World"

numbers = [x for x in string if x.isdigit()]
print (numbers)
Output: ['1', '2', '3', '4', '5‘]

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Answer this?

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Iterating Over List Elements vs. List Index Values

• Iterating Over List • List Index

Elements Values

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Tuples

• A tuple is an immutable linear data

structure. Thus, in contrast to lists, once a
tuple is defined, it cannot be altered.
• The syntax for declaring tuples in Python
is given below.
– tuples are denoted by parentheses instead of
square brackets

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Tuples Example

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Tuples

• The empty tuple is written as two parentheses

containing nothing:
tup1 = ()
• To write a tuple containing a single value you have
to include a comma, even though there is only one
value:
tup1 = (50,)
• Like string indices, tuple indices start at 0, and
tuples can be sliced, concatenated and so on.

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Updating Tuples

• Tuples are immutable which means you cannot

update them or change values of tuple elements.
But we able to take portions of an existing tuples
to create a new tuples as follows. Following is a
simple example:

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Deleting Tuple elements

• Removing individual tuple elements is not

possible. There is, of course, nothing wrong with
putting together another tuple with the undesired
elements discarded.
• To explicitly remove an entire tuple, just use the
del statement. This produce the error as after “del
tup” tuple does not exist any more

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Set

• A set is a mutable data type with

nonduplicate, unordered values,
providing the usual mathematical set
operations.
• The syntax for declaring sets in Python is
given below.

A={1,2,3,4}

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Set Methods

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Self Test Questions

• For set ‘s ‘ containing values 1, 2, 3, and set ‘t’

containing 3, 4, 5, which of the following are the
correct results for each given set operation?
– (a) s | t ➝
– (b) s & t ➝
– (c) s - t ➝

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Self Test Questions

• 1. Which of the following sequence types is a mutable type?

– (a) strings (b) lists (c) tuples
• 2. Which of the following is true?
– (a) Lists and tuples are denoted by the use of square brackets.
– (b) Lists are denoted by use of square brackets and tuples are denoted by the
use of parentheses.
– (c) Lists are denoted by use of parentheses and tuples are denoted by the
use of square brackets.
• 3. Lists and tuples must each contain at least one element.
(TRUE/FALSE)
• 4. For lst = [4, 2, 9, 1], what is the result of the following
operation, lst.insert(2, 3)?
– (a) [4, 2, 3, 9, 1] (b) [4, 3 ,2, 9, 1] (c) [4, 2, 9, 2, 1]

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Dictionary

• A dictionary is a mutable, associative

data structure of variable length.
• The syntax for declaring dictionaries in
Python is given below.

daily_temps = {'sun': 68.8, 'mon': 70.2, 'tue': 67.2, 'wed': 71.8}

Key Value

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Dictionary

• A dictionary is mutable and is another container type that

can store any number of Python objects, including other
container types.
• Dictionaries consist of pairs (called items) of keys and
their corresponding values.
• Python dictionaries are also known as associative arrays
or hash tables.
• Keys are unique within a dictionary while values may
not be.
• The values of a dictionary can be of any type, but the
keys must be of an immutable data type such as strings,
numbers, or tuples.

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Dictionary

• The syntax for declaring dictionaries in Python

is given below.

daily_temps = {'sun': 68.8, 'mon': 70.2, 'tue': 67.2, 'wed': 71.8}

Key Value

• The syntax for accessing an element of a dictionary is the

same as for accessing elements of sequence types, except
that a key value is used within the square brackets instead
of an index value:
daily_temps['sun']
Key

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Updating Dictionary

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Deleting Dictionary elements

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Properties of dictionary Keys

• More than one entry per key not allowed. Which means no
duplicate key is allowed. When duplicate keys encountered
during assignment, the last assignment wins.

• Keys must be immutable. Which means you can use

strings, numbers, or tuples as dictionary keys but
something like ['key'] is not allowed..

• Dictionary Keys Are Case-Sensitive

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Dictionary Methods

• dict.items()
– Returns a list of dict's (key, value) tuple pairs.
• dict.keys()
– Returns list of dictionary dict's keys
• dict.values()
– Returns list of dictionary dict's values
• dict.update(dict2)
– Adds dictionary dict2's key-values pairs to dict

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Dictionary fromKeys( ) method
• The method fromkeys() creates a new dictionary with keys
from seq and values set to value.
dict.fromkeys(seq[, value]))
• seq -- This is the list of values which would be used for
dictionary keys preparation.
• value -- This is optional, if provided then value would be
set to this value

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Dictionary get( ) method

• The method get() return a value for the given key.

If key is not available then returns default value
None.
dict.get(key, default=None)

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in Operator in dictionary

• ‘in’ operator to test whether the dictionary had a

certain key
• Example
dict={1:’a’,2:’b’,3:’c’}
>>> 1 in dict
>>> true

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Examples and Exercises

• Access the 03_Day Directive

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