Question

How can I remove an arbitrary item from a priority queue. Suppose I have a PriorityQueue for jobs. I have a job I want to “cancel” so I need to remove it from the queue, how can I do that?

UPDATE

To add to the answer, a related question: https://stackoverflow.com/a/9288081/292291

Answer 1

I’m assuming you’re using heapq. The documentation has this to say about this problem, which seems quite reasonable:

The remaining challenges revolve around finding a pending task and
making changes to its priority or removing it entirely. Finding a task
can be done with a dictionary pointing to an entry in the queue.

Removing the entry or changing its priority is more difficult because
it would break the heap structure invariants. So, a possible solution
is to mark the existing entry as removed and add a new entry with the
revised priority.

The documentation provides some basic example code to show how this can be done, which I reproduce here verbatim:

pq = []                         # list of entries arranged in a heap
entry_finder = {}               # mapping of tasks to entries
REMOVED = '<removed-task>'      # placeholder for a removed task
counter = itertools.count()     # unique sequence count

def add_task(task, priority=0):
    'Add a new task or update the priority of an existing task'
    if task in entry_finder:
        remove_task(task)
    count = next(counter)
    entry = [priority, count, task]
    entry_finder[task] = entry
    heappush(pq, entry)

def remove_task(task):
    'Mark an existing task as REMOVED.  Raise KeyError if not found.'
    entry = entry_finder.pop(task)
    entry[-1] = REMOVED

def pop_task():
    'Remove and return the lowest priority task. Raise KeyError if empty.'
    while pq:
        priority, count, task = heappop(pq)
        if task is not REMOVED:
            del entry_finder[task]
            return task
    raise KeyError('pop from an empty priority queue')