.Set - Unable to understand the statement

[ateestructural]

I have the following code which I have inherited it from someone else.

vocab_filename = 'vocab.txt'
vocab = load_doc(vocab_filename)
vocab = vocab.split()
vocab = set(vocab)

I know in the steps above: document gets loaded into the memory

(vocab = load_doc(vocab_filename)

, split into words

vocab = vocab.split()

but I do not follow what this last line is actually doing;

vocab = set(vocab)

Can someone help me understand what the above line does?

Thanks a lot, in advance

[ndc85430]

It takes vocab and creates a set from whatever is in it. Sets are collections that are unordered and contain unique items (and those items must be hashable). See the docs.

[ibreeden]

vocab = set(vocab)

Can someone help me understand what the above line does?

It creates a set of the list.
A set is much like a list, but it contains no duplicates.

[deanhystad]

Asking for help is not going to get you very far. It is far more instructional to figure this out for yourself.

When I don't know what is going on I resort to adding print statements. This is the first thing I would do to your code if I didn't know Python at all:

vocab_filename = 'vocab.txt'
print(type(vocab_filename), vocab_filename)
vocab = load_doc(vocab_filename)
print(type(vocab), vocab)
vocab = vocab.split()
print(type(vocab), vocab)
vocab = set(vocab)
print(type(vocab), vocab)

I use "type(thing)" because knowing the type of a thing is the first step in understanding what the thing does. Once you know the type you can google the type and find out more information.

[ndc85430]

A set is much like a list

Not really, since sets don't have a notion of order of the elements, can only contain hashable items, support different operations (union, intersection, etc.) and finding an item is done in constant time.

[deanhystad]

I disagree. A set is very much like a list. It is a container class that holds multiple values. You can iterate through a set. Set is mutable like a list. You can add and remove things from a set. You can test if a set contains a value, like a list. If you were to list the similarities and the differences the two are more similar than not.

In this particular example I think set is mostly being used to eliminate duplicats in vocab. Maybe some of the set operations will be used in the application, but I doubt it.