Chapter 11: Working with Python Sets and Frozensets in Network Automation

Powerful, duplicate-free collections that simplify filtering, matching, and set logic in your scripts.

Author

Leonardo Furtado
July 14, 2025

Welcome to the next installment of Packets & Python, a series that bridges the gap between Python fundamentals and real-world network engineering workflows.

In this post, we’re exploring the set data type, a powerful structure that lets you manage unordered collections of unique items. Sets are great when you want to ensure there are no duplicates, perform membership checks quickly, and carry out operations like comparing prefixes, tracking ASNs, or identifying anomalies in large network datasets.

You’ll discover how Python sets help network engineers filter routes, remove duplicates from telemetry, and track distinct IPs or neighbors. And just like before, you won’t just read about it, you’ll experiment with small scripts that model common tasks you deal with every day.

This lesson keeps things beginner-friendly. We introduce concepts like loops and membership testing using for and in, but don’t worry, we’ll go deeper into these building blocks in future articles.

Let’s learn how sets simplify your automation logic and boost your script performance. Time to build smarter filters.

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