Python Tutorial : Sets for unordered and unique data

Want to learn more? Take the full course at https://learn.datacamp.com/courses/data-types-for-data-science-in-python at your own pace. More than a video, you'll learn hands-on coding & quickly apply skills to your daily work. --- Now that you've learned about lists and tuples let's look at our last builtin array data type the set. Sets are excellent for finding all the unique values in a column of your data, a list of elements, or even rows from a file. We use sets when we want to store unique data elements in an unordered fashion. For example, I might want to store a list of each type of cookie I had without any duplicates. Set are also mutable so I can add and remove elements from them. We're just going to scratch the surface of what can be done with a set. It has many more capabilities that align with set theory from math. A set is almost always created from a list. For example, I might have a list of cookies I've eaten today. I can make a set of them by passing them into the set constructor. Finally, if I print it, you might notice that although I had three chocolate chip cookies in my list, once I make it a set, there is only one occurrence of it in the set. This occurs because sets only store unique items. Now let's explore modifying a set. When working with a set we will use the add method to add a new element to the set. It will only add the element if it is unique otherwise it just continues on. Also, we can add multiple items using the update method. The update method takes a list of items and adds each one to the set if it is not present. While making the first two sections of this chapter, I ate two more cookies: a biscotti and a chocolate chip cookie. So let's use the add method to add those to our set, and print the result. Finally, Hugo also had some cookies, so let's use the update method to add the cookies he ate to our set and print them. Now let's learn how to remove some elements from our set. When removing data from a set, we can use the d