PYTHON PROGRAMMING CLASS (THE BASICS) || DAY 3 - PYTHON SETS COLLECTION | WEEK 2

Good day everyone!
Hope you're doing great!! Today is the third day of the Python Programming class week 2. If you have followed my week 1 till the end, you must have acquired some basic Python programming skills that can help you start your programming career. However, if you did not follow my week 1 classes, please visit by blog now @anyiglobal to see all my week 1 classes.

I brought out this idea of teaching python on steemit because of the need for python programming skills in the world of technology today. This is the new trend in tech now because python can be used for various purposes in many applications ranging from web development, automation, artificial intelligence, software testing to many others. I decided to start this programming class on steemit communities because the communities comprise mainly of people who are still eager to learn new skills. Developers and non-developers alike can use this python.

Note: The English language used in this class is literally understandable by a layman. So let's begin...

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PYTHON SETS COLLECTION

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Sets is a type of collection that is unordered and unindexed. Unordered means that the items in a Sets collection is printed in a random manner. Sets collections are enclosed in a curly braces "{}".

For example, if we have a set of names;
names = {"Anyiglobal", "Reminiscence", "Swaylee", "Wealthmary"}.

Then the output may appear in an unordered manner like this;

names = {"Reminiscence", "Swaylee", "Anyiglobal", "Wealthmary"}.

Sets are unindexed because we cannot access items in it using an index number enclosed in a square bracket "[]" like this "names[3]". Sets collection does not allow duplicate members unlike Lists and Tuples that allows duplicate members of the items.

We will detail tuple collection in this class by discussing the following:

• How to access set items.
• How to change values in a set.
• Checking the length of a set.
• Adding items to the set.
• Removing items from the set.
• Using the set() constructor to create a set.

Note that Sets can contain collection of the same or different data types. It can collect string data types, and it can collect numeric data types.

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EXAMPLE OF SETS COLLECTION
Let's consider a set of names;

For Example;

names = {"Anyiglobal", "Reminiscence", "Swaylee", "Wealthmary"}
print(names)

Output

_{Python Sets Collection}

From the screenshot above, we can see that the output appeared in an unordered manner i.e. randomly.

NB: Copy the code above and try it out in your text editor.

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ACCESS ITEM IN A SET
As we said earlier, items in a set cannot be accessed by referring to an index. This is because Sets collection is unordered. However, we can access items stored in the set by using "for loop" or checking if a specific value is present in the set by using the "in" keyword.

For Example,

names = {"Anyiglobal", "Reminiscence", "Swaylee", "Wealthmary"}
for x in names:
  print(x)

Output
Swaylee
Reminiscence
Anyiglobal
Wealthmary

_{Accessing item in a Set}

From the code above, we can see how we used "for loop" to access all the items in the set. We can as well access a specific value by checking if the value is present in the Set.

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For Example;
Let's check if the name "Reminiscence" is present in the Set:

names = {"Anyiglobal", "Reminiscence", "Swaylee", "Wealthmary"}
print("Reminiscence" in names)

Output
True

_{Checking if a specific value is present in a set}

From the code above, we can see that the code returned True because the item "Reminiscence" is present in the set.

NB: Copy the code and try it out in your text editor.

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CHANGING ITEMS IN THE SET
We cannot change items in a set because it is immutable i.e. unchangeable.

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ADDING ITEMS TO THE SET
To add items to the set, we can use add() and update() methods to achieve that. To add one item to a set, use "add()" method, However, to add more than one item to a set, use "update()" method.

For Example,
Let's add a new name to the sets collection. Let's add "Steemcurator01" to the set:

names = {"Anyiglobal", "Reminiscence", "Swaylee", "Wealthmary"}
names.add("Steemcurator01")
print(names)

Output
{'Reminiscence', 'Steemcurator01', 'Anyiglobal', 'Wealthmary', 'Swaylee'}

_{Adding item to a Set}

From the screenshot above, we added "Steemcurator01" to the set as we can see in the screenshot above.

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To add multiple items to a set, we use the "update()" method.

For Example,
Let's add multiple items to the set.

names = {"Anyiglobal", "Reminiscence", "Swaylee", "Wealthmary"}
names.update(["Victoh98", "Starrchris", "Solexybaba"])
print(names)

Output
{'Wealthmary', 'Reminiscence', 'Solexybaba', 'Victoh98', 'Swaylee', 'Starrchris', 'Anyiglobal'}

_{Adding multiple items using the Update method}

From the screenshot above, we can see how we use the "Update()" method to add multiple names to the set.

NB: Copy the code and try it out in your text editor.

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CHECKING THE LENGTH OF A SET
To check the length of values in a set we use the "len()" method.

For Example,

names = {"Anyiglobal", "Reminiscence", "Swaylee", "Wealthmary"}
print(len(names))

Output
4

From the codes in the screenshot above, we can see that the code returned 4 as the length of the sets collection.

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REMOVING ITEM FROM A SET
To remove an item from a set, we use the "remove()" or "discard"() methods.

For Example,
Let's remove "wealthmary" from the set using the "remove()" method.

names = {"Anyiglobal", "Reminiscence", "Swaylee", "Wealthmary"}
names.remove("Wealthmary")
print(names)

Output
{'Reminiscence', 'Swaylee', 'Anyiglobal'}

_{Removing item from a set using the remove() method}

Looking at the screenshot above, we can see that we removed "Wealthmary" from the set.

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Let's also use the "discard()" method to remove "Wealthmary" from the set.

names = {"Anyiglobal", "Reminiscence", "Swaylee", "Wealthmary"}
names.discard("Wealthmary")
print(names)

Output
{'Reminiscence', 'Anyiglobal', 'Swaylee'}

_{Removing item from a set using the discard() method}

From the code in the example above, we used the "discard()" method to remove "Wealthmary" from the set.

NB: Copy the code and try it out in your the text editor. We can also "pop()" method to remove the last item in a set. In the same way, we can also use "clear()" method to clear the items in a set. And we can also use the "del" keyword to delete the set entirely.

NB: Please refer to the class on Lists collection and Tuples collection to see how clear and delete a set using the "clear()" method and "del" keyword.

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PYTHON SET() CONSTRUCTOR
We can use set() constructor to make a set collection.

For Example,

names = set(("Anyiglobal", "Reminiscence", "Swaylee", "Wealthmary"))
print(names)

Output
{'Wealthmary', 'Anyiglobal', 'Reminiscence', 'Swaylee'}

_{Python set() constructor}

From the code in the screenshot above, we can see that the set() constructor was used to make the collection a set.

NB: Copy the code above and try it out in your text editor.

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Conclusion

Python sets collection is very important in Python programming language. As a programmer you need to have a knowledge of collections in Python. In this class, we discussed how to access items in a set, how to add items to a set, how to change set value, changing items in a set, checking the length of a set, removing item from a set, and how to make a set collection using set() constructor. Thank you for being part of this class, I hope you learnt something new today!!

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This is the end of this particular class. I believe that if you followed this class till the end, you must have grabbed one or more information from the class. Please make sure to practice along with your laptop and text editor to grab every bit of the information passed.

Please do well to follow this blog, and also don't forget to resteem this post so that it can reach larger number of steemians who wants to learn this skill.

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Am glad you participated in this class! I believe you have learnt something new today.

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I am @anyiglobal, a Computer Scientist, Software Engineer and a Blogger!

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Cc:
@steem-database, @ponpase, @kouba01, @pelon53, @reminiscence01, @steemchiller, @justyy