Circular buffer in Python

Question

What should I do if I want to create an efficient circular buffer in python?

Is the following method an efficient way to use a list to collect values?

def add_to_buffer( self, num ):
    self.mylist.pop( 0 )
    self.mylist.append( num )

Answer 1

You can use collections.deque with a maxlen arg like :

>>> import collections
>>> d = collections.deque(maxlen=10)
>>> d
deque([], maxlen=10)
>>> for i in xrange(20):
...     d.append(i)
...
>>> d
deque([10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19], maxlen=10)