In Python, collections are a module that provides alternatives to Python's built-in data types such as lists, tuples, and dictionaries. The collections module provides specialized data structures that can be used to solve specific problems more efficiently than the general-purpose data structures.
Some of the commonly used data structures in the collections module include:
- Counter: A dictionary subclass for counting hashable objects.
- deque: A list-like container with fast appends and pops on both ends.
- OrderedDict: A dictionary subclass that remembers the order in which its entries were added.
- defaultdict: A dictionary subclass that calls a factory function to supply missing values.
- namedtuple: A factory function for creating tuple subclasses with named fields.
Using these specialized data structures can often lead to more efficient and readable code, as well as faster execution times. For example, the deque data structure can be used to implement a queue or a stack efficiently, and the Counter data structure can be used to count the occurrence of elements in a list or a string.
To use the collections module in Python, we simply need to import it using the import statement:
import collections
We can then use any of the data structures provided by the module by referring to them by name, such as collections.Counter or collections.deque.
