because i think that will come in handy in those future videos and it just provides a good groundwork for what we're going to be talking about in the future and the reason this is important is that often when we start implementing data structures we want to be able to represent that data structure what it looks like and so we can make sure that that our mental model is actually matching up to what's happening in our code and with things like lists and trees that's pretty straightforward we can just print out a representation of a list print out a representation to a tree not really that complicated we've done that in previous videos and there are a bunch of different ways that we can print out graphs but with graphs because they're a little more free form it may be a little less intuitive you may be like well how should i represent it there's a lot of different ways and i want to give you an idea today and i wanted to do that by showing you a quick tool okay that can make a life a bit easier when working with graphs in your programs and actually it's really a family of tools called graphis which as the name would imply are a bunch of tools for visualizing graphs i'm going to show you one of those tools the one that i find myself using a lot when i'm working with graphs and that is dot okay so dot is just a program that we run from the command line um we'll get into some more details about how that works but dot uses a simple language to represent graphs and let me just show you a quick example we can come in here and we can just say let's make a graph and so it looks like a program like we use curly braces like we would a block of code and now in here i can add edges let's say let's say that if i just put graph here it's going to be an undirected graph and let's just say we have let's say we're doing contact tracing and so let's get some data we're going to say mike is connected to jane we use semicolons to separate out our nodes or vertexes uh so connect jane she was in contact with steve susan was in contact with carrie josie was in contact with john john was in contact with mike and let's say john was also in contact with j okay so i basically this is a really simple way for me to represent a graph and then basically all the dot allows me to do is now that i've saved this file i can come in here and say dot example dot dot this is going to be the input to it i can also just take input directly from standard out or standard in and then i'm going to tell it in this case i want to create pdfs you can actually create whatever you want there's a lot of different options here i'm just going to create a pdf and then we're just going to dump the output to URL_TOKEN it could be whatever i decided to name it i'm just calling it URL_TOKEN and then this basically created a pdf image which yeah forget vs code is not going to show that to me so let's go just open it up and you can see here here let me just scale this down so it'll
NO_SEGMENT_TOKEN