Intro to Python for Computer Science and Data Science: Learning to Program with AI, Big Data and The Cloud

5.3 Tuples

As discussed in the preceding chapter, tuples are immutable and typically store heterogeneous data, but the data can be homogeneous. A tuple’s length is its number of elements and cannot change during program execution.

Creating Tuples

To create an empty tuple, use empty parentheses:

In [1]: student_tuple = ()

In [2]: student_tuple
Out[2]: ()

In [3]: len(student_tuple)
Out[3]: 0

Recall that you can pack a tuple by separating its values with commas:

In [4]: student_tuple = 'John', 'Green', 3.3

In [5]: student_tuple
Out[5]: ('John', 'Green', 3.3)

In [6]: len(student_tuple)
Out[6]: 3

When you output a tuple, Python always displays its contents in parentheses. You may surround a tuple’s comma-separated list of values with optional parentheses: ...