Python Language Tutorial => Sets versus multisets

Example

Sets are unordered collections of distinct elements. But sometimes we want to work with unordered collections of elements that are not necessarily distinct and keep track of the elements' multiplicities.

Consider this example:

>>> setA = {'a','b','b','c'}
>>> setA
set(['a', 'c', 'b'])

By saving the strings 'a', 'b', 'b', 'c' into a set data structure we've lost the information on the fact that 'b' occurs twice. Of course saving the elements to a list would retain this information

>>> listA = ['a','b','b','c']
>>> listA
['a', 'b', 'b', 'c']

but a list data structure introduces an extra unneeded ordering that will slow down our computations.

For implementing multisets Python provides the Counter class from the collections module (starting from version 2.7):

Python 2.x2.7

>>> from collections import Counter
>>> counterA = Counter(['a','b','b','c'])
>>> counterA
Counter({'b': 2, 'a': 1, 'c': 1})

Counter is a dictionary where where elements are stored as dictionary keys and their counts are stored as dictionary values. And as all dictionaries, it is an unordered collection.

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Python Language Set Sets versus multisets

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