Tuple

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Syntactically, a tuple is a comma-separated list of values:

t = 'a', 'b', 'c', 'd', 'e'

Although not necessary, it is common to enclose tuples in parentheses:

t = ('a', 'b', 'c', 'd', 'e')

Create an empty tuple with parentheses:

t0 = ()
type(t0)            # <type 'tuple'>

To create a tuple with a single element, you have to include a final comma:

t1 = 'a',
type(t1)              # <type 'tuple'>

Note that a single value in parentheses is not a tuple:

t2 = ('a')
type(t2)              # <type 'str'>

To create a singleton tuple it is necessary to have a trailing comma.

t2 = ('a',)
type(t2)              # <type 'tuple'>

Note that for singleton tuples it’s recommended (see PEP8 on trailing commas) to use parentheses. Also, no white space after the trailing comma (see PEP8 on whitespaces)

t2 = ('a',)           # PEP8-compliant
t2 = 'a',             # this notation is not recommended by PEP8
t2 = ('a', )          # this notation is not recommended by PEP8

Another way to create a tuple is the built-in function tuple.

t = tuple('lupins')
print(t)              # ('l', 'u', 'p', 'i', 'n', 's')
t = tuple(range(3))
print(t)              # (0, 1, 2)

These examples are based on material from the book Think Python by Allen B. Downey.

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Tuple:
* Tuple
* Tuple

Table Of Contents
2 Filter
3 List
7 Loops
22 Reduce
27 Classes
31 Set
42 Tuple
45 Enum
62 Sockets
89 urllib
92 Idioms
104 Stack
105 Profiling
109 Logging
111 os module
118 Mixins
120 ArcPy
126 Arrays
132 2to3 tool
135 Unicode
138 Neo4j
140 Curses
141 Templates
145 heapq
146 tkinter
154 Audio
155 pyglet
157 ijson
160 Flask
161 Groupby
163 pygame
165 hashlib
166 Gzip
167 ctypes
185 pyaudio
186 shelve