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 match the data structure features with the problem we're trying to solve.
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 to decide which of the built-in structures is appropriate.
How to do it...
- Is the programming focused on simple existence? Are items present or absent from a collection? An example of this is validating input values. When the user enters something that's in the collection, their...
