Python: Data Types

Created: Jul 16, 2021 – Last Updated: Jul 16, 2021

Tags: Python

Coming from JavaScript it’s refreshing to learn Python as it has a big standard library and easy to pick up (especially if you have prior programming knowledge). Starting off with the data types I want to highlight some awesome features that Python has and interesting differences I saw. So don’t expect this to be a complete guide or comparison of both.

Note

If you want to try the instructions below you can fire up the Python REPL. If you have Python installed run python in your terminal. Any Python code that starts with >>> symbols indicated that it was typed into a REPL.

#Helper Functions

Python itself has helpful functions to help you define and discover the types. They are type(), dir(), and help().

>>> name = "Lennart"
>>> type(name)
<class 'str'>
>>> dir(str)
['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__dir__', '__doc__', '__eq__', '__format__', '__ge__', '__getattribute__', '__getitem__', '__getnewargs__', '__gt__', '__hash__', '__init__', '__init_subclass__', '__iter__', '__le__', '__len__', '__lt__', '__mod__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__reduce__', '__reduce_ex__', '__repr__', '__rmod__', '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__sizeof__', '__str__', '__subclasshook__', 'capitalize', 'casefold', 'center', 'count', 'encode', 'endswith', 'expandtabs', 'find', 'format', 'format_map', 'index', 'isalnum', 'isalpha', 'isascii', 'isdecimal', 'isdigit', 'isidentifier', 'islower', 'isnumeric', 'isprintable', 'isspace', 'istitle', 'isupper', 'join', 'ljust', 'lower', 'lstrip', 'maketrans', 'partition', 'removeprefix', 'removesuffix', 'replace', 'rfind', 'rindex', 'rjust', 'rpartition', 'rsplit', 'rstrip', 'split', 'splitlines', 'startswith', 'strip', 'swapcase', 'title', 'translate', 'upper', 'zfill']
>>> help(str.title)
Help on method_descriptor:

title(self, /)
    Return a version of the string where each word is titlecased.

    More specifically, words start with uppercased characters and all remaining
    cased characters have lower case.

#Numbers

Python has more explicit types for working with numbers. In JavaScript they are mashed together into Number.

>>> x = 4
>>> y = 5.0
>>> z = 42j
>>> type(x)
<class 'int'>
>>> type(y)
<class 'float'>
>>> type(z)
<class 'complex'>

#Tuple

Tuples are immutable collections that you can use to track related but different items. Thus they are great as immutable keys in set and dict. Unpacking is a way of quickly getting information from a tuple:

>>> favourite_food = ("Italian", "Pizza")
>>> cuisine, name = favourite_food
>>> cuisine
'Italian'
>>> name
'Pizza'

#Set

A set is mutable and stores immutable types in an unsorted way. You can’t store other mutable types (like list, set or dict) in it. A set can only contain unique items.

This is great to quickly deduplicate a list:

>>> names = ["Luke", "Leia", "Malak", "Luke"]
>>> set(names)
{'Leia', 'Luke', 'Malak'}

You can execute a couple of mutations on a set (.add or .discard etc.) but I definitely found .update interesting since you can add multiple values at once:

>>> chars = {"James", "Naomi", "Amos"}
>>> addition = {"Alex", "Julie"}
>>> chars.update(addition)
>>> chars
{'Julie', 'James', 'Naomi', 'Alex', 'Amos'}

Another cool thing are the set operations — union and intersection:

>>> chars = {"James", "Naomi", "Amos"}
>>> favourite_chars = {"James"}
>>> chars | addition
{'Julie', 'James', 'Naomi', 'Alex', 'Amos'}
>>> chars & favourite_chars
{'James'}

#Dictionary

A dictionary is mutable and stores key:value pairs (keys can only be immutable types). Thus it’s extremely fast to search in. Besides the standard stuff there are three helpful methods: keys(), values(), items():

>>> chars = { "expanse": "Holden", "star_wars": "Luke" }
>>> chars.keys()
dict_keys(['expanse', 'star_wars'])
>>> chars.values()
dict_values(['Holden', 'Luke'])
>>> chars.items()
dict_items([('expanse', 'Holden'), ('star_wars', 'Luke')])

While these functions alone are not doing much, they can come in really handy in for-loops:

>>> for franchise, char in chars.items():
...     print(f"The char {char} exists in the franchise {franchise}")
...
The char Holden exists in the franchise expanse
The char Luke exists in the franchise star_wars

Since items() returns a list of tuples one can use tuple unpacking to get both values.

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