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Lesson 9Understanding Basic Data Structures: Tuples

In this lesson, we continue to look at understanding basic data types in Python; however, we shift from lists to tuples. In the previous lesson, you learned about lists, which store a sequence of data values. You learned that these values stored in a list did not have to be unique and that you could add and remove them. In this lesson, the focus shifts to tuples, which are a collection of values, which will still allow you to have duplicates; however, the values are ordered and unchangeable.

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

By the end of this lesson, you will be able to:

• Use tuples to store data collections
• Use tuples to retrieve values
• Work with indexes and tuples
• Slice and combine tuples
• Understand immutability
• Search tuples.

TUPLES AND TUPLE OPERATIONS

A tuple is another way to save a group of related pieces of data in Python. The biggest difference between a tuple and a list is that a tuple is immutable, which means that we cannot add or remove items from a tuple after we have defined it. However, as with lists, we can:

• Store values of any data type, including different data types in the same tuple
• Compute the length of a tuple
• Use index values to retrieve specific items from a tuple
• Slice tuples to retrieve multiple items at the same time

The basic syntax of a tuple is:

thisTuple = ("element1", "element2", "element3")

Syntax of Tuples vs. Syntax of Lists

Like lists, tuples are a basic data structure type in Python, and ...