Tuples

A tuple is an ordered collection like a list — but frozen . Once you create it, it can never change. That sounds restrictive, yet it's exactly what you want for fixed records: a coordinate, an RGB color, a database row, a function returning two values at once.

Learn Tuples in our free Python course — a beginner-friendly interactive lesson with runnable examples, a practice exercise and a quick recall.

Part of the free Python course at LearnCodingFast — hands-on lessons with examples you run in your browser, plus practice exercises and a quick quiz.

Tuples also unlock Python's elegant unpacking syntax, which you'll use constantly.

Tuples use parentheses (or just commas). Once built, they're locked:

You can read a tuple freely, but any attempt to change it raises an error. That guarantee is exactly why tuples are useful for fixed data:

Unpacking spreads a tuple's elements into separate variables in one clean line. You've already seen it in variable swapping — it's everywhere in Python:

This is the single most common professional use of tuples. A function that needs to hand back two or three results just returns them comma-separated — Python packs them into a tuple, and the caller unpacks:

Looping over pairs uses the same idea — enumerate() and zip() (next lessons) both yield tuples that you unpack right in the for statement.

Everything you can do to read a list, you can do to a tuple. Only the editing operations are missing:

Tuples have just two methods ( count and index ) because they can't be modified — there's no append , sort , or remove . To "change" a tuple, convert it: list(my_tuple) , edit, then tuple(...) back.

These lines should compute a midpoint from two coordinate tuples and print it. Reorder them so the output is Midpoint: (3.0, 4.0) .

Why: the tuples a (B) and b (E) must exist before you unpack them (D, A). The midpoint calculation (C) needs all four coordinates, and the print (F) comes last.

<class 'int'> — without a trailing comma, parentheses just group a single value. (7,) would be a tuple.

[2, 3, 4] — a takes the first item and the starred b collects the rest into a list.

TypeError — tuples are immutable, so item assignment raises "'tuple' object does not support item assignment". Nothing prints.

Use tuple unpacking to compute the distance between two points.

Lesson complete — tuples mastered!

You can create tuples (including the tricky single-item case), use their immutability deliberately, unpack them into variables, and return multiple values from functions. Tuples are the quiet workhorse behind much of Python's clean syntax.

🚀 Up next: Comprehensions — build lists, dicts, and sets in a single expressive line.

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