Python Tuples

Hi everyone welcome back to another amazing lesson on python. If you are new, please do checkout our previous articles to get a better understanding of what we are going do today and also subscribe to our YouTube channel for the video tutorials.

In the previous lesson, we saw a python list, how they are accessed, it different inbuilt functions. Unlike a list that we have just seen, we won’t be able to change elements in a tuple once they have been created. In the creation of a tuple, we will use parentheses instead of square brackets.

Syntax for a tuple

Mytuple=()

How to create a tuple

As we earlier said, we are going to use parentheses instead of square brackets. We will place items within the parenthesis and separate them with a comma

Example

Mytuple_x=(10,9,8,7,6,5,4)

Note that, we can also create a tuple without the parenthesis and also create empty tuple

Example

numbers=5,3,4,2,1 

Tuple membership test

This membership is not different from the one which we have seen in python list, we use the operators ‘in’ and ‘not in’ to see if a tuple has a particular item. Let us look an example

our_tuple=('p','r','u','k','o','l','n')
print('g' in our_tuple)
print('p' in our_tuple)

OUTPUT

Python tuple methods

Only two python methods work will tuple which are the count and the index method. Let us have a brief understanding of what they are 

1. Count method

We use the count method to know the position of an element in a given set of elements

Syntax

Mytuple.count(a)

2. Index(s)

We use the index method to know the index of the first element which is the given element.

Syntax

Mytuple.index(a)

Built-in functions with tuples

The in-built functions in a python tuple is the same as those of a python list

Len()

Returns the number of the element in a tuple

Example

tuple_one=('cat','dog','lion')
x=len(tuple_one)
print(x)

OUTPUT

Max()

We use the max when we want to know the largest number on a tuple 

numbers_tuple=('1','5','10','56','4')
x=max(numbers_tuple)
print(x)

OUTPUT

Iterating through a tuple

We can iterate through each item in a tuple with the ‘for’ loop.

Examples

testtuple = ("India", "Canada", "Japan", "Italy")
 
for item in testtuple:
    print(item)

OUTPUT

Now imagine you have been asked to give the differences between a list and tuple and the one which you prefer to use when handling your data. Well, you are in luck because there isn’t any much difference between a list and a tuple, except for the symbol used to enclose their element and the fact that one is changeable and the other is not, tuples and list are very similar. Nevertheless, you will likely used a tuple to hold elements which are of different data types, while you will prefer a list when working with elements of similar data types.

And in terms of deciding which one to use, they are good number reasons for you to choose a tuple over a list to handle your data, some of which are:

The tuple’s unchangeable nature results in a faster iteration which can improve a program’s nature.

The unchangeable elements in a tuple can be used as dictionary keys, something that is not possible with a list.

The unchangeable data-type of a tuple will ensure our stay-write to be protected.

Hope this session was interesting. Happy coding