Choosing a data structure
Python offers a number of built-in data structures to help us work with collections of data. It can be confusing to determine which is appropriate for a given purpose.
How do we choose which structure to use? What are the features of lists, sets, and dictionaries? Why do we have tuples and frozen sets?
Getting ready
Before we put data into a collection, we'll need to consider how we'll gather the data, and what we'll do with the collection once we have it. The big question is always how we'll identify a particular item within the collection.
We'll look at a few key questions that we need to answer.
How to do it...
- Is the programming focused on doing membership tests? An example of this is a collection of valid input values. When the user enters something that's in the collection, their input is valid, otherwise it's invalid.
Simple membership suggests using a set:
valid_inputs = {"yes", "y", "no", "n"}
answer = None
while answer not in valid_inputs...
