Frozen Sets

00:00 Let’s talk about frozen sets, which are exactly the same as regular sets but are immutable and, by definition, hashable. Let’s first define a regular set and see how the syntax is almost the same. So here we have y. It contains three elements, {'bar', 'baz', 'foo'}.

00:16 Let’s just do Up arrow, create a new variable x, put the word frozen in front of the word set(), and now we have a frozenset.

00:26 You can operate on a frozenset just like how you would on a regular set, so we can even get the length, we can iterate through our frozenset.

00:36 We can also use operators such as intersection (&). So here, we can actually intersect our frozenset with a regular set and get a frozenset.

00:46 So this would get the intersection of our set {'foo', 'bar', 'baz'} with a set {'baz'}, and it just contains 'baz'. We can do other things like difference (-).

00:56 Let me clear the output. But, as I mentioned before, the one difference is that frozen sets are immutable. That means we cannot mutate them. So normally, we can do something like x.add() and it errors. It says 'frozenset' object has no attribute 'add'.

01:13 We can’t clear it.

01:16 We can’t pop anything. We can’t do anything like that.

01:21 And x stayed the same. This is useful because many objects and data structures like sets can only contain hashable objects. So we can’t have a set of sets, right?

01:32 That isn’t allowed. We can’t have a set with a set in it—unhashable type: 'set'—but we could have a set with a frozenset inside of it.

01:40 So this is sort of the idea of having sets of sets, except the sets inside of our set can’t be changed. So we could change our actual set, we can add a frozenset to another set, and then now x has two frozensets.

01:58 So notice how I didn’t actually mutate the set inside of x, but I just mutated x itself to add a frozenset.

02:07 This is also very useful if, let’s say, you want to use a set as a key in a dictionary. Well, normally we can’t do that,

02:18 but we can do frozenset().

02:22 So sometimes this is useful because we could do something like dict.keys(), we can do for key in d.keys(): and then print the key.

02:32 So, we actually can maybe say print(1 in key). And that’s True, because 1 exists in the key of our dictionary, which is a frozenset. This is not something we can do with regular sets.