This is the most basic kind of value in Redis. For every key in Redis, we also have a value that can have a data type, such as string, integer or double. Let's start with an example for setting and getting data to and from Redis:

>>> r.set('gender:An', 'male')
True
>>> r.get('gender:An')
b'male'

In this example we want to store the gender info of a person, named An into Redis. Our key is gender:An and our value is male. Both of them are a type of string.

The set() function receives two parameters: the key and the value. The first parameter is the key and the second parameter is value. If we want to update the value of this key, we just call the function again and change the value of the second parameter. Redis automatically updates it.

The get() function will retrieve the value of our key, which is passed as the parameter. In this case, we want to get gender information of the key gender:An.

In the second example, we show you another kind of value type, an integer:

>>> r.set('visited_time:An', 12)
True
>>> r.get('visited_time:An')
b'12'
>>> r.incr('visited_time:An', 1)
13
>>> r.get('visited_time:An')
b'13'

We saw a new function, incr(), which used to increment the value of key by a given amount. If our key does not exist, RedisDB will create the key with the given increment as the value.

We have a few methods for interacting with list values in Redis. The following example uses rpush() and lrange() functions to put and get list data to and from the DB:

>>> r.rpush('name_list', 'Tom')
1L
>>> r.rpush('name_list', 'John')
2L
>>> r.rpush('name_list', 'Mary')
3L
>>> r.rpush('name_list', 'Jan')
4L
>>> r.lrange('name_list', 0, -1)
[b'Tom', b'John', b'Mary', b'Jan']
>>> r.llen('name_list')
4
>>> r.lindex('name_list', 1)
b'John'

Besides the rpush() and lrange() functions we used in the example, we also want to introduce two others functions. First, the llen() function is used to get the length of our list in the Redis for a given key. The lindex() function is another way to retrieve an item of the list. We need to pass two parameters into the function: a key and an index of item in the list. The following table lists some other powerful functions in processing list data structure with Redis:

This data structure is also similar to the list type. However, in contrast to a list, we cannot store duplicate values in our set:

>>> r.sadd('country', 'USA')
1
>>> r.sadd('country', 'Italy')
1
>>> r.sadd('country', 'Singapore')
1
>>> r.sadd('country', 'Singapore')
0
>>> r.smembers('country')
{b'Italy', b'Singapore', b'USA'}
>>> r.srem('country', 'Singapore')
1
>>> r.smembers('country')
{b'Italy', b'USA'}

Corresponding to the list data structure, we also have a number of functions to get, set, update or delete items in the set. They are listed in the supported functions for set data structure, in the following table:

The ordered set data structure takes an extra attribute when we add data to a set called score. An ordered set will use the score to determine the order of the elements in the set:

>>> r.zadd('person:A', 10, 'sub:Math')
1
>>> r.zadd('person:A', 7, 'sub:Bio')
1
>>> r.zadd('person:A', 8, 'sub:Chem')
1
>>> r.zrange('person:A', 0, -1)
[b'sub:Bio', b'sub:Chem', b'sub:Math']
>>> r.zrange('person:A', 0, -1, withscores=True)
[(b'sub:Bio', 7.0), (b'sub:Chem', 8.0), (b'sub:Math', 10.0)]

By using the zrange(name, start, end) function, we can get a range of values from the sorted set between the start and end score sorted in ascending order by default. If we want to change the way method of sorting, we can set the desc parameter to True. The withscore parameter is used in case we want to get the scores along with the return values. The return type is a list of (value, score) pairs as you can see in the preceding example.

See the following table for more functions available on ordered sets: