You’ve now seen strings, lists, sets, tuples, and dictionaries. They all have their uses. Here is a table comparing them:
Collection |
Mutable? |
Ordered? |
Use When… |
---|---|---|---|
str |
No |
Yes |
You want to keep track of text. |
list |
Yes |
Yes |
You want to keep track of an ordered sequence that you want to update. |
tuple |
No |
Yes |
You want to build an ordered sequence that you know won’t change or that you want to use as a key in a dictionary or as a value in a set. |
set |
Yes |
No |
You want to keep track of values, but order doesn’t matter, and you don’t want to keep duplicates. The values must be immutable. |
dictionary |
Yes |
No |
You want to keep a mapping of keys to values. The keys must be immutable. |