Data Structures in Python

In any programming language, we need to deal with data.  Now, one of the most fundamental things that we need to work with the data is to store, manage, and access it efficiently in an organized way so it can be utilized whenever required for our purposes. Data Structures are used to take care of all our needs.

What are Data Structures?

Data Structures are fundamental building blocks of a programming language. It aims to provide a systematic approach to fulfill all the requirements mentioned previously in the article. The data structures in Python are List, Tuple, Dictionary, and Set. They are regarded as implicit or built-in Data Structures in Python. We can use these data structures and apply numerous methods to them to manage, relate, manipulate and utilize our data.

We also have custom Data Structures that are user-defined namely Stack, Queue, Tree, Linked List, and Graph. They allow users to have full control over their functionality and use them for advanced programming purposes. However, we will be focussing on the built-in Data Structures for this article.

LIST

Lists help us to store our data sequentially with multiple data types. They are comparable to arrays with the exception that they can store different data types like strings and numbers at the same time. Every item or element in a list has an assigned index. Since Python uses 0-based indexing, the first element has an index of 0 and the counting goes on. The last element of a list starts with -1 which can be used to access the elements from the last to the first. To create a list we have to write the items inside the square brackets.