Tuple

Tuple in Python is:

• a sequence of elements separated by a comma and enclosed in parentheses

• immutable ordered data type

Roughly speaking, a tuple is a list that can’t be changed. We can say that the tuple has read-only permissions. It could be a defense against accidental change.

Create an empty tuple:

In [1]: tuple1 = tuple()

In [2]: print(tuple1)
()

Tuple with one element (note the comma):

In [3]: tuple2 = ('password',)

Tuple from list:

In [4]: list_keys = ['hostname', 'location', 'vendor', 'model', 'ios', 'ip']

In [5]: tuple_keys = tuple(list_keys)

In [6]: tuple_keys
Out[6]: ('hostname', 'location', 'vendor', 'model', 'ios', 'ip')

Objects in tuple can be accessed as well as objects in list, by order number:

In [7]: tuple_keys[0]
Out[7]: 'hostname'

But since tuple is immutable you cannot assign a new value:

In [8]: tuple_keys[1] = 'test'
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
TypeError                                 Traceback (most recent call last)
<ipython-input-9-1c7162cdefa3> in <module>()
----> 1 tuple_keys[1] = 'test'

TypeError: 'tuple' object does not support item assignment

Function sorted sorts tuple elements in ascending order and returns a new list with sorted elements:

In [2]: tuple_keys = ('hostname', 'location', 'vendor', 'model', 'ios', 'ip')

In [3]: sorted(tuple_keys)
Out[3]: ['hostname', 'ios', 'ip', 'location', 'model', 'vendor']