Tuples are ordered collections of heterogeneous data that are unchangeable. Learn how to use a tuple data structure in Python. Also, learn how to create, access, and modify a tuple.

Table of contents

• What is a Tuple
• Creating a Tuple
• Create a tuple with a single item
• Packing and Unpacking
• Length of a Tuple
• Iterating a Tuple
• Accessing items of a Tuple
• Indexing
• Negative Indexing
• Slicing a tuple
• Finding an item in a Tuple
• Find within a range
• Checking if an item exists
• Adding and changing items in a Tuple
• Modify nested items of a tuple
• Removing items from a tuple
• Using del keyword
• By converting it into a List
• Count the occurrence of an item in a tuple
• Copying a tuple
• Concatenating two Tuples
• Using the + operator
• Using the sum() function
• Using the chain() function
• Nested tuples
• Use built-in functions with tuple
• min() and max()
• all()
• any()
• When to use Tuple?
• Summary of tuples operations

What is a Tuple

Tuples are ordered collections of heterogeneous data that are unchangeable. Heterogeneous means tuple can store variables of all types.

Tuple has the following characteristics

• Ordered: Tuples are part of sequence data types, which means they hold the order of the data insertion. It maintains the index value for each item.
• Unchangeable: Tuples are unchangeable, which means that we cannot add or delete items to the tuple after creation.
• Heterogeneous: Tuples are a sequence of data of different data types (like integer, float, list, string, etc;) and can be accessed through indexing and slicing.
• Contains Duplicates: Tuples can contain duplicates, which means they can have items with the same value.

When to use Tuple?

As tuples and lists are similar data structures, and they both allow sequential data storage, tuples are often referred to as immutable lists. So the tuples are used for the following requirements instead of lists.

• There are no append() or extend() to add items and similarly no remove() or pop()methods to remove items. This ensures that the data is write-protected. As the tuples are Unchangeable, they can be used to represent read-only or fixed data that does not change.
• As they are immutable, they can be used as a key for the dictionaries, while lists cannot be used for this purpose.
• As they are immutable, the search operation is much faster than the lists. This is because the id of the items remains constant.
• Tuples contain heterogeneous (all types) data that offers huge flexibility in data that contains combinations of data types like alphanumeric characters.