store-and-access-immutable-data-in-a-tuple.md

Store And Access Immutable Data In A Tuple

You can store heterogeneous data (of varying types) as a tuple which is a light-weight immutable data structure.

You can be explicit about the tuple by wrapping the items in parentheses:

>>> book = ('An Immense World', 'Ed Yong', 2022)

Though it is also possible to comma-separate the items and forego the parentheses.

>>> book2 = 'The Shining', 'Stephen King', 1977
>>> book2
('The Shining', 'Stephen King', 1977)

Once we have our tuple, we can access any item from it positionally. We can also use sequence unpacking to assign the values to a series of variables:

>>> book[0]
'An Immense World'
>>> book[1]
'Ed Yong'
>>> book[2]
2022
>>> title, author, publication_year = book
>>> title
'An Immense World'
>>> author
'Ed Yong'
>>> publication_year
2022

And, as promised, it is immutable (unlike lists):

>>> book[1] = 'Agatha Christie'
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
TypeError: 'tuple' object does not support item assignment

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