Best data-structure to use for two ended sorted list

Posted by fmark on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by fmark
Published on 2010-05-15T06:18:28Z Indexed on 2010/05/15 6:24 UTC
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Filed under:

python

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data-structures

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algorithm

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collections

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Performance

I need a collection data-structure that can do the following:

Be sorted
Allow me to quickly pop values off the front and back of the list
Remain sorted after I insert a new value
Allow a user-specified comparison function, as I will be storing tuples and want to sort on a particular value
Thread-safety is not required
Optionally allow efficient haskey() lookups (I'm happy to maintain a separate hash-table for this though)

My thoughts at this stage are that I need a priority queue and a hash table, although I don't know if I can quickly pop values off both ends of a priority queue. I'm interested in performance for a moderate number of items (I would estimate less than 200,000). Another possibility is simply maintaining an OrderedDictionary and doing an insertion sort it every-time I add more data to it.

Furthermore, are there any particular implementations in Python. I would really like to avoid writing this code myself.

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