#understanding python set

Find out about Python sets: what they are, the manner to create them, when to use them, built-in functions, and their relationship to set theory operations.

Firstly, Python is a powerful programming language that has started regaining its fame for its usage in the Data Science along with the latest technologies like R and etc. Having said that, let us take a look at the tiny winy bits of concepts to get ourselves more grounded in this programming language. Let's get started.

In this article, we will try to understand the concept of sets in Python programming language. To give you a superior understanding on what sets can do in Python programming language, take a look at the following area.

Python sets:

Much the same as dictionaries, sets have no structure in the collections of items or objects. Sets necessitate that the items or objects that are stored within are hashable. Sets also require that the elements present in them are unique and unchanging – the exact opposite of what we have seen. Anyway, the set itself is changeable, i.e, we can add or remove elements from it. To sum all the points that we have discussed here, we need to use sets when we have an unordered set of values that are unique, immutable and which are hashable also.

A set of elements can be made by putting the elements in curly braces or use the inherent set() function to add elements to it. Please take a look at the following python pop example for your better understanding.

veryFirstSet = {1, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13}

veryFirstSet = set([1, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13])

Creating a set with no elements within it is a bit of a tricky process. Creating a set with empty curly braces supports a dictionary instead of a set, yet whereas creating an empty set using the implicit function set() creates a set without any troubles. Keep in mind that curly braces can only be used to initialize a set containing values. Using curly braces without values is one of the ways to initialize a dictionary and not a set.

As we have known, sets are mutable – but since they are unordered, indexes would not make any sense to it. We will not be able to access or update an element based on the index of an element in a set, as the set does not support both indexing and slicing. To add an element to a set, we can use the add() method and to add more than one element to a set, we can use the update() method – in either of the cases, duplicates are not allowed to be added to the set. Start posting in python and build your career ahead!

Advantages of Python Sets

Since sets can't have different multiple occurrences of the same element, it makes sets highly helpful to efficiently expel copy values from a list or tuple and to perform basic math operations like unions and intersections.