Does Python have an ordered set?

There is an ordered set (possible new link) recipe for this which is referred to from the Python 2 Documentation. This runs on Py2.6 or later and 3.0 or later without any modifications. The interface is almost exactly the same as a normal set, except that initialisation should be done with a list.

OrderedSet([1, 2, 3])

This is a MutableSet, so the signature for .union doesn't match that of set, but since it includes __or__ something similar can easily be added:

@staticmethoddef union(*sets):    union = OrderedSet()    union.union(*sets)    return uniondef union(self, *sets):    for set in sets:        self |= set

The answer is no, but you can use collections.OrderedDict from the Python standard library with just keys (and values as None) for the same purpose.

Update: As of Python 3.7 (and CPython 3.6), standard dict is guaranteed to preserve order and is more performant than OrderedDict. (For backward compatibility and especially readability, however, you may wish to continue using OrderedDict.)

Here's an example of how to use dict as an ordered set to filter out duplicate items while preserving order, thereby emulating an ordered set. Use the dict class method fromkeys() to create a dict, then simply ask for the keys() back.

>>> keywords = ['foo', 'bar', 'bar', 'foo', 'baz', 'foo']>>> list(dict.fromkeys(keywords))['foo', 'bar', 'baz']

An ordered set is functionally a special case of an ordered dictionary.

The keys of a dictionary are unique. Thus, if one disregards the values in an ordered dictionary (e.g. by assigning them None), then one has essentially an ordered set.

As of Python 3.1 and 2.7 there is collections.OrderedDict. The following is an example implementation of an OrderedSet. (Note that only few methods need to be defined or overridden: collections.OrderedDict and collections.MutableSet do the heavy lifting.)

import collectionsclass OrderedSet(collections.OrderedDict, collections.MutableSet):    def update(self, *args, **kwargs):        if kwargs:            raise TypeError("update() takes no keyword arguments")        for s in args:            for e in s:                 self.add(e)    def add(self, elem):        self[elem] = None    def discard(self, elem):        self.pop(elem, None)    def __le__(self, other):        return all(e in other for e in self)    def __lt__(self, other):        return self <= other and self != other    def __ge__(self, other):        return all(e in self for e in other)    def __gt__(self, other):        return self >= other and self != other    def __repr__(self):        return 'OrderedSet([%s])' % (', '.join(map(repr, self.keys())))    def __str__(self):        return '{%s}' % (', '.join(map(repr, self.keys())))        difference = property(lambda self: self.__sub__)    difference_update = property(lambda self: self.__isub__)    intersection = property(lambda self: self.__and__)    intersection_update = property(lambda self: self.__iand__)    issubset = property(lambda self: self.__le__)    issuperset = property(lambda self: self.__ge__)    symmetric_difference = property(lambda self: self.__xor__)    symmetric_difference_update = property(lambda self: self.__ixor__)    union = property(lambda self: self.__or__)