Python's Collections Module: Introduction

Introduction

This module implements specialized container datatypes providing alternatives to Python’s general purpose built-in containers, dict, list, set, and tuple.

What types does it offer?

Following are the most commonly used special container types of collections module,

Name	Purpose
Counter	dict subclass for counting hashable objects
OrderedDict	dict subclass that remembers the order entries were added
defaultdict	dict subclass that calls a factory function to supply missing values
deque	list-like container with fast appends and pops on either end
namedtuple	factory function for creating tuple subclasses with named fields

And...

We can also implement a custom container type like OrderedCounter using the container types provided by collections module.

The next series of posts will dive deep into the above mentioned container types provided by collections module.

Stay Tuned !