The time complexity of common operations on Python's many data structures.

Trey Hunner writes:

This article is primarily meant to act as a Python time complexity cheat sheet for those who already understand what time complexity is and how the time complexity of an operation might affect your code. For a more thorough explanation of time complexity see Ned Batchelder’s article/talk on this subject.

Read Python Big O: the time complexities of different data structures in Python

  • @sugar_in_your_tea
    2•1 month ago

    sorted_sequence.index(item)

    Shouldn’t this be O(n log n)? I guess Python doesn’t have a list that stays sorted.

    As a workaround, just use dict keys with no values instead.

        • Nomecks
          1•1 month ago

          Ah, sorry. Sets are unique, not ordered. Thanks!

          • @sugar_in_your_tea
            1•1 month ago

            Yeah, I just think it’s kind of odd though. If a language only has lists and hash maps, my go-to is to use a hash map for uniqueness, and sort the list for ordered lists.

            But in Python, it’s backwards where I use the hash map (dict) for ordered data and the set for uniqueness, because hash maps are unordered in most languages I’ve used.