heapq with custom compare predicate

Solution 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
       self.index = 0
       if initial:
           self._data = [(key(item), i, item) for i, item in enumerate(initial)]
           self.index = len(self._data)
           heapq.heapify(self._data)
       else:
           self._data = []

   def push(self, item):
       heapq.heappush(self._data, (self.key(item), self.index, item))
       self.index += 1

   def pop(self):
       return heapq.heappop(self._data)[2]

(The extra self.index part is to avoid clashes when the evaluated key value is a draw and the stored value is not directly comparable - otherwise heapq could fail with TypeError)

Solution 2:

Define a class, in which override the __lt__() function. See example below (works in Python 3.7):

import heapq

class Node(object):
    def __init__(self, val: int):
        self.val = val

    def __repr__(self):
        return f'Node value: {self.val}'

    def __lt__(self, other):
        return self.val < other.val

heap = [Node(2), Node(0), Node(1), Node(4), Node(2)]
heapq.heapify(heap)
print(heap)  # output: [Node value: 0, Node value: 2, Node value: 1, Node value: 4, Node value: 2]

heapq.heappop(heap)
print(heap)  # output: [Node value: 1, Node value: 2, Node value: 2, Node value: 4]