Inspired by the post Populating a sparse list with random 1's on StackOverflow.

A "sparse list" is a list where most (say, more than 95% of) values will be None (or some other default) and for reasons of memory efficiency you don't wish to store these (cf. Sparse array).

This implementation has a similar interface to Python's built-in list but stores the data in a dictionary to conserve memory.

sparse_list is available from The Python Package Index (PyPI) .

Installation is simply:

$ pip install sparse_list

See the unit-tests!

1. Fork it
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
4. Ensure the tests pass for all Pythons in .travis.yml
5. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
6. Create new Pull Request

If you find this stuff useful, please follow this repository on GitHub. If you have something to say, you can contact johnsyweb on Twitter and GitHub.

I'm grateful for contributions to what was a solo project (hooray for GitHub )! If you'd like to thank the contributors, you can find their details here:

https://github.com/johnsyweb/python_sparse_list/graphs/contributors