Python Tuples
Tuples in Python are similar to lists in that they can contain multiple values of varying data types, however, tuples are read-only, so once defined, they cannot be changed in any way. Due to this, they must be defined and initialised in one statement. A noticeable difference between a tuple and a list, is that a tuple is defined using parenthesis, whereas a list uses square brackets.
The example below creates a tuple of strings called ‘names’ and initialises it with three values, then, using a ‘for’ loop, displays the names in the console.
names = ("George", "Bob", "Fred") for name in names: print(name)
The output from this will be as follows.
George Bob Fred
It is possible to omit the parenthesis when defining and initialising a tuple with no adverse effects.
names = "George", "Bob", "Fred"
Similar to lists, tuples are zero based meaning that the first item in a tuple has an index value of zero and not one. As well as being able to access items in a tuple using a ‘for’ loop, as shown above, the index value can be used to access a single item. The example below outputs the second item in the tuple to the console, which has an index of one.
print(names[1])
A major use of tuples is to pack multiple values in to them with a view of unpacking the values into separate variables at a later point in time. One such example of this is returning multiple values from a function and assigning all the values to separate variables in one statement. Here multiple names are returned from a function and assigned to the variables ‘name1’, ‘name2’ and ‘name3’, which are then displayed to the console, one at a time, producing the same output as shown in the above ‘for’ loop example.
def names():
return "George", "Bob", "Fred"
name1, name2, name3 = names()
print(name1)
print(name2)
print(name3)
A further similarity that tuples have with lists is that slices can be used to return a specific portion, which is useful where they contain a large number of values.