Python Polars 0.18.7

🚀 Performance improvements

• speed up python object to AnyValue construction (#9840)
• use hash set in drop_many (#9807)
• speed up in series 10x (#9794)
• Faster is_sorted when no flag set (#9777)

✨ Enhancements

• Add Run-length Encoding functions (#9826)
• add include_key parameter to partition_by (#9750)
• add LEFT string function for SQL (#9836)
• add REGEXP_LIKE function for SQL (both two and three parameter version) (#9838)
• add maintain_order argument to sort/top_k/bottom_k (#9672)
• Dedicated horizontal aggregation functions (#9752)
• support numpy datetime64 units (from 'ns' to 'D') in polars.from_numpy (#9783)
• implement with_row_count as private function (#9810)
• add support for SQL SUBSTR function (#9803)
• add SQL support for binary data and expand recognised SQL dtype strings (#9802)
• add new duration selector and improve selector typing (#9772)
• reworked comfy-table layout constraints, improving table wrapping/repr (#9744)

🐞 Bug fixes

• fix row-encode of 32 byte payloads (#9843)
• shrink_type on all-null columns (#9811)
• don't go into streaming engine when groupby by list (#9834)
• fix regex + exclude (#9827)
• add maintain_order argument to sort/top_k/bottom_k (#9672)
• fix array concat and Series::fill_null (#9825)
• dont preserve sortedness in offset_by for tz-aware non-constant durations (#9818)
• Remove stray arr.eval references (#9821)
• fix row-encode of null data (#9813)
• allow +00:00 when loading from arrow (#9747)
• improve/fix write_database handling of db schema and quoted table names (#9788)
• fix row-count schema (#9797)
• fix supertype detection (#9787)
• fix import error when writing parquet with pyarrow (#9760)

🛠️ Other improvements

• Refactor failing test (#9823)
• Remove stray arr.eval references (#9821)
• Remove old cut/qcut (#9763)
• improve note about the behaviour when converting from ns-precision temporal values to python-native types (#9798)
• Small updates to issue templates (#9789)
• More cleanup around arange (#9769)
• add missing last entry (#9782)
• Add rows_by_key docs (#9766)

Thank you to all our contributors for making this release possible!
@CloseChoice, @MarcoGorelli, @alexander-beedie, @avimallu, @jonashaag, @magarick, @mcrumiller, @ritchie46 and @stinodego