How to Install SortedContainers in the Python Shell or With a Python Script

Table of contents

Context

Python does not have ordered map or ordered set in the system library. Java has TreeMap and TreeSet. C++ has map and set. Thanks to Grant Jenks, Python now actually has one more. The SortedList data structure allows duplicates and is not typically seen in other programming languages.

Check out some questions in the sorting tag.

Interview Platform Programming Language Versions

How to check the Python version in a Python shell? We can check it with sys like below.

import sys
print(sys.version)

# hackerrank
3.12.4 (main, Aug  2 2024, 14:40:51) [GCC 10.2.1 20210110]

Platform document page for coding environments:

1. LeetCode, sortedcontainers included.
2. HackerRank, sortedcontainers not available, cannot install.
3. CoderPad, sortedcontainers included.
4. CodeInterview,sortedcontainers not included, can install.

How to Install sortedcontainers in a Python Shell or With a Python Script

You can use the following command (tested at codeinterview.io) for Python 2 and Python 3.5+.

import pip;
pip.main(['install', 'sortedcontainers'])

For Python 3.4, you can use the following command.

import sys, subprocess;
subprocess.run([sys.executable, '-m', 'pip', 'install', '--user', 'sortedcontainers'])
# remove --user if running from a virtual environment

You should see the following output in stdout.

WARNING: pip is being invoked by an old script wrapper. This will fail in a future version of pip.
Please see https://github.com/pypa/pip/issues/5599 for advice on fixing the underlying issue.
To avoid this problem you can invoke Python with '-m pip' instead of running pip directly.
Collecting sortedcontainers
  Downloading sortedcontainers-2.4.0-py2.py3-none-any.whl.metadata (10 kB)
Downloading sortedcontainers-2.4.0-py2.py3-none-any.whl (29 kB)
Installing collected packages: sortedcontainers
Successfully installed sortedcontainers-2.4.0
WARNING: Running pip as the 'root' user can result in broken permissions and conflicting behaviour with the system package manager, possibly rendering your system unusable.It is recommended to use a virtual environment instead: https://pip.pypa.io/warnings/venv. Use the --root-user-action option if you know what you are doing and want to suppress this warning.

After that, you can test importing useful classes from sortedcontainers.

from sortedcontainers import SortedList

a=SortedList()
a.add(1)
a.add(2)
print(a)

And you should see output below in stdout.

SortedList([1, 2])

Reference

1. invent with python