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Tuples

The last immutable sequence type we're going to see is the tuple. A tuple is a sequence of arbitrary Python objects. In a tuple, items are separated by commas. They are used everywhere in Python, because they allow for patterns that are hard to reproduce in other languages. Sometimes tuples are used implicitly; for example, to set up multiple variables on one line, or to allow a function to return multiple different objects (usually a function returns one object only, in many other languages), and even in the Python console, you can use tuples implicitly to print multiple elements with one single instruction. We'll see examples for all these cases:

>>> t = ()  # empty tuple
>>> type(t)
<class 'tuple'>
>>> one_element_tuple = (42, )  # you need the comma!
>>> three_elements_tuple = (1, 3, 5)  # braces are optional here
>>> a, b, c = 1, 2, 3  # tuple for multiple assignment
>>> a, b, c  # implicit tuple to print with one instruction
(1, 2, 3)
>>> 3 in three_elements_tuple  # membership test
True

Notice that the membership operator in can also be used with lists, strings, dictionaries, and, in general, with collection and sequence objects.

Notice that to create a tuple with one item, we need to put that comma after the item. The reason is that without the comma that item is just itself wrapped in braces, kind of in a redundant mathematical expression. Notice also that on assignment, braces are optional so my_tuple = 1, 2, 3 is the same as my_tuple = (1, 2, 3).

One thing that tuple assignment allows us to do, is one-line swaps, with no need for a third temporary variable. Let's see first a more traditional way of doing it:

>>> a, b = 1, 2
>>> c = a  # we need three lines and a temporary var c
>>> a = b
>>> b = c
>>> a, b  # a and b have been swapped
(2, 1)

And now let's see how we would do it in Python:

>>> a, b = 0, 1
>>> a, b = b, a  # this is the Pythonic way to do it
>>> a, b
(1, 0)

Take a look at the line that shows you the Pythonic way of swapping two values. Do you remember what I wrote in Chapter 1, A Gentle Introduction to Python? A Python program is typically one-fifth to one-third the size of equivalent Java or C++ code, and features like one-line swaps contribute to this. Python is elegant, where elegance in this context also means economy.

Because they are immutable, tuples can be used as keys for dictionaries (we'll see this shortly). To me, tuples are Python's built-in data that most closely represent a mathematical vector. This doesn't mean that this was the reason for which they were created though. Tuples usually contain an heterogeneous sequence of elements, while on the other hand, lists are most of the times homogeneous. Moreover, tuples are normally accessed via unpacking or indexing, while lists are usually iterated over.