Unpacking a Tuple in Python

Python offers immutable data types known as tuples. In this article, we will learn about packing an unpacking tuple type in Python 3.x. Or earlier.

Packing and Unpacking a Tuple

Python offers a very powerful tuple assignment tool that maps right hand side arguments into left hand side arguments. THis act of mapping together is known as unpacking of a tuple of values into a norml variable. WHereas in packing, we put values into a regular tuple by means of regular assignment.

Now let’s take a look at its implementation −

Example

# Packing tuple varibles under one varible name
tup = ("Tutorialspoint", "Python", "Unpacking a tuple")
   # Packing tuple varibles into a group of arguments
   (website, language, topic) = tup
   # print college name
print(website,"\t",language," ",topic)

Output

Tutorialspoint     Python   Unpacking a tuple

During the unpacking of tuple, the total number of variables on the left-hand side should be equivalent to the total number of values in given tuple tup.

Python gives the syntax to pass optional arguments (*arguments) for tuple unpacking of arbitrary length. All values will be assigned to every variable in the order of their specification and all remaining values will be assigned to *arguments . Let’s consider the following code.

Example

# Packing tuple variables under one variable name
tup = ("Tutorialspoint", "Python","3.x.",":Data
Structure","Unpacking a tuple")
   # Packing tuple variables into a group of arguments
   (website,*language, topic) = tup
   # print college name
print(website,"\t",*language," ",topic)

Output

Tutorialspoint Python 3.x. :Data Structure Unpacking a tuple

In python tuples can be unpacked using a function in function tuple is passed and in function, values are unpacked into a normal variable. The following code explains how to deal with an arbitrary number of arguments.

“*_” is used to specify the arbitrary number of arguments in the tuple.

Example

# Packing tuple varibles under one varible name
tup = ("Tutorialspoint", "Python","3.x.","Data Structure:","Unpacking a tuple")
# UnPacking tuple variables into a group of arguments and skipping unwanted arguments
(website,*_,typ,topic) = tup
# print college name
print(website,"\t",typ," ",topic)

Output

Tutorialspoint    Data Structure:    Unpacking a tuple

In case we want to skip only one argument then we can replace “*_” by “_”

Conclusion

In this article, we learnt how we can pack and unpack tuples in a variety of Ways.