Tuples are an ordered sequences of items, just like lists. The main difference between tuples and lists is that tuples cannot be changed (immutable) unlike lists which can (mutable).

# Way 1
emptyTuple = ()

You can also initialize an empty tuple by using the tuple function.

# Way 2
emptyTuple = tuple()

A tuple with values can be initialized by making a sequence of values separated by commas.

# way 1
z = (3, 7, 4, 2)
# way 2 (tuples can also can be created without parenthesis)
z = 3, 7, 4, 2

It is important to keep in mind that if you want to create a tuple containing only one value, you need a trailing comma after your item.

# tuple with one value
>>> tup1 = ('Michael',)
# tuple with one value
>>> tup2 = 'Michael',
# This is a string, NOT a tuple.
>>> notTuple = ('Michael')

Accessing Values in Tuples

Each value in a tuple has an assigned index value. It is important to note that python is a zero indexed-based language. All this means is that the first value in the tuple is at index 0.

# Initialize a tuple
>>> z = (3, 7, 4, 2)
# Access the first item of a tuple at index 0
>>> print(z[0])
3

Python also supports negative indexing. Negative indexing starts from the end of the tuple. It can sometimes be more convenient to use negative indexing to get the last item in a tuple because you don’t have to know the length of a tuple to access the last item.

# print last item in the tuple
>>> print(z[-1])
2

Tuple slices

Slice operations return a new tuple containing the requested items. Slices are good for getting a subset of values in your tuple. For the example code below, it will return a tuple with the items from index 0 up to and not including index 2.

# Initialize a tuple
>>> z = (3, 7, 4, 2)
# first index is inclusive (before the :) and last (after the :) is not.
>>> print(z[0:2])
3, 7
# everything up to but not including index 3
>>> print(z[:3])
3, 7, 4

Tuples are Immutable

Tuples are immutable which means that after initializing a tuple, it is impossible to update individual items in a tuple. As you can see in the code below, you cannot update or change the values of tuple items (this is different from Python List which are mutable).

>>> z = (3, 7, 4, 2)
>>> z
(3, 7, 4, 2)
>>> z[0] = 1
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
TypeError: 'tuple' object does not support item assignment

Even though tuples are immutable, it is possible to take portions of existing tuples to create new tuples as the following example demonstrates.

# Initialize tuple
tup1 = ('Python', 'SQL')
# Initialize another Tuple
tup2 = ('R',)
# Create new tuple based on existing tuples
new_tuple = tup1 + tup2;
print(new_tuple)

Iterate through a Tuple

You can iterate through the items of a tuple by using a for loop.

>>> for item in ('lama', 'sheep', 'lama', 48):
>>>   print(item)
lama
sheep
lama
48

Enumerate

The enumerate function returns a tuple containing a count for every iteration (from start which defaults to 0) and the values obtained from iterating over a sequence:

>>> friends = ('Steve', 'Rachel', 'Michael', 'Monica')
>>> for index, friend in enumerate(friends):
>>>    print(index,friend)
0 Steve
1 Rachel
2 Michael
3 Monica

Conclusion

Hence we studied in this article what is tuple in python and how to implement along with its different properties and how to iterate tuple.

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