The
set
function in Python is a built-in tool that converts an iterable into a set, which, as mentioned, is an unordered collection of unique elements. To invoke the function, you simply pass an iterable–like a list, tuple, or even a string–as an argument to
set()
.
For example, if you have a list with repeated elements and need to eliminate redundancies, the
set
function enables this in one straightforward operation. Consider the following:
numbers = [1, 2, 2, 3, 4, 4, 5, 5]unique_numbers = set(numbers)
After execution,
unique_numbers
will contain only the distinct integers from the
numbers
list:
{1, 2, 3, 4, 5}
. Importantly, while the
set()
function makes it easy to remove duplicates, it's crucial to remember that the original order of items is lost in the process.