Python “set” with duplicate/repeated elements

Question

Is there a standard way to represent a \"set\" that can contain duplicate elements.

As I understand it, a set has exactly one or zero of an element. I want functiona

Answer 1

Your approach with dict with element/count seems ok to me. You probably need some more functionality. Have a look at collections.Counter.

• O(1) test whether an element is present and current count retrieval (faster than with element in list and list.count(element))
• counter.elements() looks like a list with all duplicates
• easy manipulation union/difference with other Counters