Develop Reference

How to append only unique values to a key in a dictionary?

sorry this is likely a complete noob question, although I'm new to python and am unable to implement any online suggestions such that they actually work. I need decrease the run-time of the code for larger files, so need to reduce the number of iterations i'm doing.
How do I modify the append_value function below to append only UNIQUE values to dict_obj, and remove the need for another series of iterations to do this later on.
EDIT: Sorry, here is an example input/output
Sample Input:
6
5 6
0 1
1 4
5 4
1 2
4 0
Sample Output:
1
4
I'm attempting to solve to solve:
http://orac.amt.edu.au/cgi-bin/train/problem.pl?problemid=416
Output Result
input_file = open("listin.txt", "r")
output_file = open("listout.txt", "w")
ls = []
n = int(input_file.readline())
for i in range(n):
a, b = input_file.readline().split()
ls.append(int(a))
ls.append(int(b))
def append_value(dict_obj, key, value): # How to append only UNIQUE values to
if key in dict_obj: # dict_obj?
if not isinstance(dict_obj[key], list):
dict_obj[key] = [dict_obj[key]]
dict_obj[key].append(value)
else:
dict_obj[key] = value
mx = []
ls.sort()
Dict = {}
for i in range(len(ls)):
c = ls.count(ls[i])
append_value(Dict, int(c), ls[i])
mx.append(c)
x = max(mx)
lss = []
list_set = set(Dict[x]) #To remove the need for this
unique_list = (list(list_set))
for x in unique_list:
lss.append(x)
lsss = sorted(lss)
for i in lsss:
output_file.write(str(i) + "\n")
output_file.close()
input_file.close()
Thank you

The answer to your question, 'how to only append unique values to this container' is fairly simple: change it from a list to a set (as #ShadowRanger suggested in the comments). This isn't really a question about dictionaries, though; you're not appending values to 'dict_obj', only to a list stored in the dictionary.
Since the source you linked to shows this is a training problem for people newer to coding, you should know that changing the lists to sets might be a good idea, but it's not the cause of the performance issues.
The problem boils down to: given a file containing a list of integers, print the most common integer(s). Your current code iterates over the list, and for each index i, iterates over the entire list to count matches with ls[i] (this is the line c = ls.count(ls[i])).
Some operations are more expensive than others: calling count() is one of the more expensive operations on a Python list. It reads through the entire list every time it's called. This is an O(n) function, which is inside a length n loop, taking O(n^2) time. All of the set() filtering for non-unique elements takes O(n) time total (and is even quite fast in practice). Identifying linear-time functions hidden in loops like this is a frequent theme in optimization, but profiling your code would have identified this.
In general, you'll want to use something like the Counter class in Python's standard library for frequency counting. That kind of defeats the whole point of this training problem, though, which is to encourage you to improve on the brute-force algorithm for finding the most frequent element(s) in a list. One possible way to solve this problem is to read the description of Counter, and try to mimic its behavior yourself with a plain Python dictionary.

Answering the question you haven't asked: Your whole approach is overkill.
You don't need to worry about uniqueness; the question prompt guarantees that if you see 2 5, you'll never see 5 2, nor a repeat of 2 5
You don't even care who is friends with who, you just care how many friends an individual has
So don't even bother making the pairs. Just count how many times each player ID appears at all. If you see 2 5, that means 2 has one more friend, and 5 has one more friend, it doesn't matter who they are friends with.
The entire problem can simplify down to a simple exercise in separating the player IDs and counting them all up (because each appearance means one more unique friend), then keeping only the ones with the highest counts.
A fairly idiomatic solution (reading from stdin and writing to stdout; tweaking it to open files is left as an exercise) would be something like:
import sys
from collections import Counter
from itertools import chain, islice
def main():
numlines = int(next(sys.stdin))
friend_pairs = map(str.split, islice(sys.stdin, numlines)) # Convert lines to friendship pairs
counts = Counter(chain.from_iterable(friend_pairs)) # Flatten to friend mentions and count mentions to get friend count
max_count = max(counts.values()) # Identify maximum friend count
winners = [pid for pid, cnt in counts.items() if cnt == max_count]
winners.sort(key=int) # Sort winners numerically
print(*winners, sep="\n")
if __name__ == '__main__':
main()
Try it online!
Technically, it doesn't even require the use of islice nor storing to numlines (the line count at the beginning might be useful to low level languages to preallocate an array for results, but for Python, you can just read line by line until you run out), so the first two lines of main could simplify to:
next(sys.stdin)
friend_pairs = map(str.split, sys.stdin)
But either way, you don't need to uniquify friendships, nor preserve any knowledge of who is friends with whom to figure out who has the most friends, so save yourself some trouble and skip the unnecessary work.

If you intention is to have a list in each value of the dictionary why not iterate the same way you iterated on each key.
if key in dict_obj.keys():
for elem in dict_obje[key]: # dict_obje[key] asusming the value is a list
if (elem == value):
else:
# append the value to the desired list
else:
dic_obj[key] = value

Python functions: return method inside a 'for' loop

I have the following code:
def encrypt(plaintext, k):
return "".join([alphabet[(alphabet.index(i)+k)] for i in plaintext.lower()])
I don't understand how python can read this kind of syntax, can someone break down what's the order of executions here?
I came across this kind of "one-line" writing style in python a lot, which always seemed to be so elegant and efficient but I never understood the logic.
Thanks in advance, have a wonderful day.

In Python we call this a list comprehension. There other stackoverflow posts that have covered this topic extensively such as: What does “list comprehension” mean? How does it work and how can I use it? and Explanation of how nested list comprehension works?.
In your example the code is not complete so it is hard to figure what "alphabet" or "plaintext" are. However, let's try to break down what it does on the high level.
"".join([alphabet[(alphabet.index(i)+k)] for i in plaintext.lower()])
Can be broken down as:
"".join( # The join method will stitch all the elements from the container (list) together
[
alphabet[alphabet.index(i) + k] # alphabet seems to be a list, that we index increasingly by k
for i in plaintext.lower()
# we loop through each element in plaintext.lower() (notice the i is used in the alphabet[alphabet.index(i) + k])
]
)
Note that we can re-write the for-comprehension as a for-loop. I have created a similar example that I hope can clarify things better:
alphabet = ['a', 'b', 'c']
some_list = []
for i in "ABC".lower():
some_list.append(alphabet[alphabet.index(i)]) # 1 as a dummy variable
bringing_alphabet_back = "".join(some_list)
print(bringing_alphabet_back) # abc
And last, the return just returns the result. It is similar to returning the entire result of bringing_alphabet_back.

Python: increment index range by 1

I have this code:
f = open('story.txt', 'r')
story = f.read()
a = 0
b = 2
active_words = story[a:b]
I'm trying to make it so later on in the program I can increase the range of this index by (+1), so that instead of taking one word out of the story as active_words, it takes 2,3,4... etc. Ideally this would be able to happen inside part of a while loop.
My apologies for my lack of formatting, this is my first post.
I'm also just starting to learn python and so there's probably a dead easy solution I've overlooked... I've tried trying to define a function like extend(active_words), but to no avail.
Thanks in advance!

A basic nested for-loop seems to be what you are looking for:
n = len(story)
for k in range(2,n+1):
for j in range(n-k+1):
active_words = story[j:j+k]
The outer loop controls the length of the slice and the inner loop actually generates the slices.
Note that these are just string slices, which will contain fragments of words. You might want something like story = story.split() prior to the loop.

Are you trying to split a sentence into words?
if so, try instead using:
story = f.read()
words = story.split()
for word in words:
print(word)

Find all the possible N-length anagrams - fast alternatives

I am given a sequence of letters and have to produce all the N-length anagrams of the sequence given, where N is the length of the sequence.
I am following a kinda naive approach in python, where I am taking all the permutations in order to achieve that. I have found some similar threads like this one but I would prefer a math-oriented approach in Python. So what would be a more performant alternative to permutations? Is there anything particularly wrong in my attempt below?
from itertools import permutations
def find_all_anagrams(word):
pp = permutations(word)
perm_set = set()
for i in pp:
perm_set.add(i)
ll = [list(i) for i in perm_set]
ll.sort()
print(ll)

If there are lots of repeated letters, the key will be to produce each anagram only once instead of producing all possible permutations and eliminating duplicates.
Here's one possible algorithm which only produces each anagram once:
from collections import Counter
def perm(unplaced, prefix):
if unplaced:
for element in unplaced:
yield from perm(unplaced - Counter(element), prefix + element)
else:
yield prefix
def permutations(iterable):
yield from perm(Counter(iterable), "")
That's actually not much different from the classic recursion to produce all permutations; the only difference is that it uses a collections.Counter (a multiset) to hold the as-yet-unplaced elements instead of just using a list.
The number of Counter objects produced in the course of the iteration is certainly excessive, and there is almost certainly a faster way of writing that; I chose this version for its simplicity and (hopefully) its clarity

This is very slow for long words with many similar characters. Slow compared to theoretical maximum performance that is. For example, permutations("mississippi") will produce a much longer list than necessary. It will have a length of 39916800, but but the set has a size of 34650.
>>> len(list(permutations("mississippi")))
39916800
>>> len(set(permutations("mississippi")))
34650
So the big flaw with your method is that you generate ALL anagrams and then remove the duplicates. Use a method that only generates the unique anagrams.
EDIT:
Here is some working, but extremely ugly and possibly buggy code. I'm making it nicer as you're reading this. It does give 34650 for mississippi, so I assume there aren't any major bugs. Warning again. UGLY!
# Returns a dictionary with letter count
# get_letter_list("mississippi") returns
# {'i':4, 'm':1, 'p': 2, 's':4}
def get_letter_list(word):
w = sorted(word)
c = 0
dd = {}
dd[w[0]]=1
for l in range(1,len(w)):
if w[l]==w[l-1]:
d[c]=d[c]+1
dd[w[l]]=dd[w[l]]+1
else:
c=c+1
d.append(1)
dd[w[l]]=1
return dd
def sum_dict(d):
s=0
for x in d:
s=s+d[x]
return s
# Recursively create the anagrams. It takes a letter list
# from the above function as an argument.
def create_anagrams(dd):
if sum_dict(dd)==1: # If there's only one letter left
for l in dd:
return l # Ugly hack, because I'm not used to dics
a = []
for l in dd:
if dd[l] != 0:
newdd=dict(dd)
newdd[l]=newdd[l]-1
if newdd[l]==0:
newdd.pop(l)
newl=create(newdd)
for x in newl:
a.append(str(l)+str(x))
return a
>>> print (len(create_anagrams(get_letter_list("mississippi"))))
34650
It works like this: For every unique letter l, create all unique permutations with one less occurance of the letter l, and then append l to all these permutations.
For "mississippi", this is way faster than set(permutations(word)) and it's far from optimally written. For instance, dictionaries are quite slow and there's probably lots of things to improve in this code, but it shows that the algorithm itself is much faster than your approach.

Maybe I am missing something, but why don't you just do this:
from itertools import permutations
def find_all_anagrams(word):
return sorted(set(permutations(word)))

You could simplify to:
from itertools import permutations
def find_all_anagrams(word):
word = set(''.join(sorted(word)))
return list(permutations(word))
In the doc for permutations the code is detailled and it seems already optimized.

I don't know python but I want to try to help you: probably there are a lot of other more performant algorithm, but I've thought about this one: it's completely recursive and it should cover all the cases of a permutation. I want to start with a basic example:
permutation of ABC
Now, this algorithm works in this way: for Length times you shift right the letters, but the last letter will become the first one (you could easily do this with a queue).
Back to the example, we will have:
ABC
BCA
CAB
Now you repeat the first (and only) step with the substring built from the second letter to the last one.
Unfortunately, with this algorithm you cannot consider permutation with repetition.

How could this function be implemented without recursion?

I'm trying to do a bingo game, I had some struggle with it but finally sorted it out.
However, my main "problem" (more like, I've heard its bad programming) is that with my function I'm calling my function inside it in an else statement. I don't think that it's how you suppose to do it, i have not found any way around it though.. Because this function is called from another function called menu() so when i use a loop, it goes back to the menu if false.
Here's my code:
def selectingNumbers():
numbers = []
dupl = []
j = 0
print("Now you are gonna select 5 number\n")
while j < 5:
nummer = int(input("Your choice:\n"))
numbers.append(int(nummer))
j = j+1
for i in numbers:
if i not in dupl:
dupl.append(i) #New list without duplicates
if dupl == numbers: #Comparing new list with old list
print("No equal numbers found")
dragning(numbers)
else:
print("Equal numbers found")
selectingNumbers() #Is there a better way to do it?
I also had some issues with the list at the beginning, I know I can use the set() function but i want to keep the original list as it is and compare the new one with the old one, can I do that in a better way with "real" programming instead of import modules?
Hope you can answer or guide me on these two questions with alternatives and if so, say why my code is "bad" if it is.

Well you have to decide if you want to use recursion to solve the problem. This line is a recursive call:
selectingNumbers() #Is there a better way to do it?
Which is fine, and does not equate to bad programming. However, the rest of your function does no cater to a recursive function. You reset your variables and have no true base case because of that. See google, or here for examples.
Recursion is confusing for beginners, so I would take an iterative only approach. Here is a bingo python example.
In addition, I'm not sure this line works:
if dupl == numbers: #Comparing new list with old list
I am not too familiar with python, but in my experience, arrays are treated as objects, so in that line you would be asking python to compare two seperate objects with unique references in memory. So they will never be equal, even if the values inside of them are the same because they are both referenced seperately. I found this link to answer that concern.

Recursion isn't "bad". In fact it can sometimes greatly simplify a solution to a problem. However in the case of your code it isn't necessary. Fortunately, it can sometimes be replaced with a loop. In the case of your code it looks like it could just loop until it gets a list from the user that doesn't contain any duplicates. That means it could be rewritten as shown below (I also simplified a few other things):
def selectingNumbers():
while True:
print("Now you are gonna select 5 different numbers\n")
numbers = []
for _ in range(5):
number = int(input("Your choice:\n"))
numbers.append(number)
unique = set(numbers) # will remove any duplicates
if len(unique) == len(numbers): # no dups?
print("No equal numbers found")
break # <--- terminates loop
else:
print("Equal numbers found")
# allow loop to continue
dragning(numbers)