Tuples in Python

Before you start learning about tuples, you need to understand what a data structure is. A data structure is nothing but a collection of data values.

Practically, whenever you are handling data, you are not given a single number or a string; instead, you are given a set of values and asked to manage them. There are multiple data structures because each data structure has its unique properties.

So, let’s start learning about tuples.

In the video, you were introduced to two data structures, namely, lists and tuples. They are compound data types, which means they can contain data of different types. A tuple contains a sequence of comma-separated values within parentheses. An important feature of a tuple is immutability, which means the elements of a tuple cannot be altered. It is used to store data such as employee information, which is not allowed to be changed.

For example: ('Gupta', 24 , 'Project Manager')

Here, we are storing the employee information name, age and designation in the form of a tuple. This makes this information unchangeable or immutable.

One crucial point to observe from the list of examples covered in the video, is that a tuple can also be defined without using parentheses. For example:

X = 1, 2, 3, 4 → makes X a tuple

The next obvious question is how to access the elements of a tuple or how to print each element of a tuple. Let’s watch the following video to find the answer to this question.

Tuples are ordered sequences, which means the order in which the elements are inserted remains the same. This makes them flexible for indexing and slicing just like strings.

In indexing of strings, each character is assigned an index; similarly, each element is given an index here. Using slicing, you were able to obtain substrings of the data; here, you will be able to obtain a subset of elements. 

In this video,  you learnt that a tuple can have an iterable object or another sequence as its elements.

t = (1,5,"Disco", ("Python", "Java"))

If you apply the type function on the forth element, it would return a tuple:

t = (1,5,"Disco", ("Python", "Java"))
type(t[3])
tuple

Towards the end of the video, you saw how the inbuilt dir() function helps to look for the list of methods that can be used while handling tuples. The dir() function only gives the list of methods available; instead, using the help() function and passing an empty tuple gives you a brief description of each of the methods available with tuples: