Collections are another in a series of containers that you can use to store information in memory. For IronPython developers, the main reasons to use collections are:
- Developmental efficiency
- Application speed
- Design flexiblity
IronPython doesn’t include collection support by default; you must import it into your application through the collections module. The collections module comes with a number of collection objects. If you’re using the latest version of IronPython, you gain access to these collection features:
- deque (data type)
- defaultdict (data type)
- namedtuple() (data type factory function)
For the most part, collections really are just replacements for the default IronPython storage containers such as list. In many cases, you see collections used to support specialized storage
classes — something not discussed in this chapter. To give you an example of how the objects in the containers module work, this section discusses the deque, which has the following methods associated with it.
- append(): Appends a new item to the right side of the deque.
- appendleft(): Appends a new item to the left side of the deque.
- clear(): Removes all of the elements from the deque and leaves the length at 0.
- extend(): Adds elements to the right side of the deque using an iterable argument, such as a sequence.
- extendleft(): Adds elements to the left side of the deque using an iterable argument, such
as a sequence. Adding items to the left side of the deque reverses the order of the elements in the iterable argument. For example, if you have a list that contains [‘a‘, ‘b‘, ‘c‘], this method will add them in the order [‘c‘, ‘b‘, ‘a‘]. - pop(): Removes an item from the right side of the deque and returns it as output to the caller. If the deque is empty, this call will raise an IndexError.
- popleft(): Removes an item from the left side of the deque and returns it as output to the caller. If the deque is empty, this call will raise an IndexError.
- remove(): Removes the first occurrence of an item, starting from the left side of the deque. If the deque doesn’t contain the requested value, this method raises a ValueError.
- rotate(): Rotates the elements in the deque to the right the number of steps specified. If the supplied value is negative, the method rotates the deque elements the number of steps requested to the left.
Now that you have a basic idea of what a deque can do, it’s time to take a look at one in action. Listing 4-12 shows a basic deque example.
Listin g 4-12: Interacting with a deque
[code]
# Define a function for printing.
def Show(type, array):
print type
for String in array:
print String
# Import just the deque feature of the collections module.
from collections import deque
# Create the deque.
Numbers = deque([‘Red’, ‘Yellow’, ‘Blue’])
Show(‘Original Deque’, Numbers)
# Add a value to the deque.
Numbers.append(‘Orange’)
Show(‘nAppend Orange to the Right’, Numbers)
# Add a value to the left side of the deque.
Numbers.appendleft(‘Green’)
Show(‘nAppend Green to the Left’, Numbers)
# Remove a value.
Numbers.remove(‘Yellow’)
Show(‘nRemoved Yellow’, Numbers)
# Pop a value.
Popped = Numbers.pop()
print ‘nPopped:’, Popped
# Rotate the deque.
Numbers.rotate(2)
Show(‘nRotated 2 to the Right’, Numbers)
# Pause after the debug session.
raw_input(‘Press any key to continue…’)
[/code]
This example begins with a slightly modified version of the Show() function provided in Listing 4-7. Essentially, using this function saves a little of the coding time the developer requires to display the output onscreen.
A deque is more flexible than the built-in structures because you can work with both the right and left side of the deque. In this case, the code appends a value to the right and then to the left.
As with the built-in structures, you can remove, delete, or pop values from the deque. Unlike the built-in structures, you can also pop values from the left, which means you can create a number of interesting structure types. For example, you could create a rotating queue. Of course, you don’t even have to worry about popping values if you want to rotate values — simply use rotate() as shown in the example.