I am new to Python, and I am familiar with implementations of Multimaps in other languages. Does Python have such a data structure built-in, or available in a commonly-used library?
To illustrate what I mean by "multimap":
a = multidict()
a[1] = 'a'
a[1] = 'b'
a[2] = 'c'
print(a[1]) # prints: ['a', 'b']
print(a[2]) # prints: ['c']
You can take list of tuples and than can sort them as if it was a multimap.
listAsMultimap=[]
Let's append some elements (tuples):
listAsMultimap.append((1,'a'))
listAsMultimap.append((2,'c'))
listAsMultimap.append((3,'d'))
listAsMultimap.append((2,'b'))
listAsMultimap.append((5,'e'))
listAsMultimap.append((4,'d'))
Now sort it.
listAsMultimap=sorted(listAsMultimap)
After printing it you will get:
[(1, 'a'), (2, 'b'), (2, 'c'), (3, 'd'), (4, 'd'), (5, 'e')]
That means it is working as a Multimap!
Please note that like multimap here values are also sorted in ascending order if the keys are the same (for key=2, 'b' comes before 'c' although we didn't append them in this order.)
If you want to get them in descending order just change the sorted() function like this:
listAsMultimap=sorted(listAsMultimap,reverse=True)
And after you will get output like this:
[(5, 'e'), (4, 'd'), (3, 'd'), (2, 'c'), (2, 'b'), (1, 'a')]
Similarly here values are in descending order if the keys are the same.