heapq with custom compare predicate

问题

I am trying to build a heap with a custom sort predicate. Since the values going into it are of 'user-defined' type, I cannot modify their built-in comparison predicate.

Is there a way to do something like:

h = heapq.heapify([...], key=my_lt_pred)
h = heapq.heappush(h, key=my_lt_pred)

Or even better, I could wrap the heapq functions in my own container so I don't need to keep passing the predicate.

回答1:

According to the heapq documentation, the way to customize the heap order is to have each element on the heap to be a tuple, with the first tuple element being one that accepts normal Python comparisons.

The functions in the heapq module are a bit cumbersome (since they are not object-oriented), and always require our heap object (a heapified list) to be explicitly passed as the first parameter. We can kill two birds with one stone by creating a very simple wrapper class that will allow us to specify a key function, and present the heap as an object.

The class below keeps an internal list, where each element is a tuple, the first member of which is a key, calculated at element insertion time using the key parameter, passed at Heap instantiation:

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
import heapq

class MyHeap(object):
   def __init__(self, initial=None, key=lambda x:x):
       self.key = key
       if initial:
           self._data = [(key(item), item) for item in initial]
           heapq.heapify(self._data)
       else:
           self._data = []

   def push(self, item):
       heapq.heappush(self._data, (self.key(item), item))

   def pop(self):
       return heapq.heappop(self._data)[1]

回答2:

The heapq documentation suggests that heap elements could be tuples in which the first element is the priority and defines the sort order.

More pertinent to your question, however, is that the documentation includes a discussion with sample code of how one could implement their own heapq wrapper functions to deal with the problems of sort stability and elements with equal priority (among other issues).

In a nutshell, their solution is to have each element in the heapq be a triple with the priority, an entry count and the element to be inserted. The entry count ensures that elements with the same priority a sorted in the order they were added to the heapq.

回答3:

The limitation with both answers is that they don't allow ties to be treated as ties. In the first, ties are broken by comparing items, in the second by comparing input order. It is faster to just let ties be ties, and if there are a lot of them it could make a big difference. Based on the above and on the docs, it is not clear if this can be achieved in heapq. It does seem strange that heapq does not accept a key, while functions derived from it in the same module do.
P.S.: If you follow the link in the first comment ("possible duplicate...") there is another suggestion of defining le which seems like a solution.

来源：https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8875706/heapq-with-custom-compare-predicate