Lecture 15 – Tuples and

Dictionaries
Tuples, keys and values for dictionaries
Kok-Seng Wong | 2022
MOTIVATION EXAMPLE 1

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MOTIVATION EXAMPLE 2

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LEARNING OUTCOMES
Upon the completion of this lecture, students will be able to:
• understand the important characteristics of tuples and
dictionaries in Python.
• define tuples and dictionaries in Python program.

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TUPLES

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CREATING A TUPLE
• Tuple: placing all elements inside parentheses separated by
commas enclose tuples in
parentheses
my_tuple = ("a", "e", "i", "o", "u")

• Tuple with empty element:

• Tuple with a singe element:

Must include a
comma at the end!

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TUPLE UNPACKING
• Tuple unpacking: extract tuple elements into a single variable

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CLASS PRACTICE
Sample Code:
>>> enemy_list = ("Wray", "Thomas", "Billy")
>>> (e1, e2, e3, e4) = enemy_list

Output:

ValueError: not enough values to unpack (expected 4, got

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CLASS PRACTICE
Sample Code:
eat(*foods)

use * operator to unpack the tuple so that all

Output:

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CLASS PRACTICE
Sample Code:

Output:

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CLASS PRACTICE
Sample Code:
eat_total(*st)

With * operator, eat_total packs all

Output:

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TUPLE ARE IMMUTABLE
• tuples are immutable: elements of a tuple cannot be changed once
they have been assigned.

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OPERATION ON TUPLE: CONCATENATE
• We can concatenate two or more tuples:

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OPERATION ON TUPLE: DELETE
• We can delete the entire tuple:

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OPERATION ON TUPLE: SLICING
• We can access a range of items in a tuple by using the slicing
operator:

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ACCESSING LISTS IN TUPLE

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REPLACING A TUPLE
• tuples are immutable: but we can replace it with a different tuple.

single element

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CHANGING A TUPLE
• Tuples are immutable, but the mutable elements can be changed.
• If a value within a tuple is mutable (e.g., a list), then you can change
it:

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TUPLE() CONVERSION
• We can convert a sequence (list or string) into a tuple:

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TUPLE ASSIGNMENT
• Conventional method to the values of two variables:

• with tuple assignment:

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SUM() FUNCTION
• sum(): returns the sum of all items in an iterable

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OTHER BUILT-IN FUNCTIONS

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CLASS PRACTICE
Sample Code:
student = ("Jack", "Ali", "Baba", "James", "Thomas")
score = (43, 98, 23, 55, 41)
print(f"Total {len(student)} students in the student tuple")
print(f"The largest item is {max(student)}")
print(f"The largest score is {max(score)}")

Output:

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COMPARING TUPLES
• Sequences of the same type also support comparisons.
• In particular, tuples (and lists) are compared lexicographically
by comparing corresponding elements.
• To compare equal, every element must compare equal, and the
two sequences must be of the same type and length.

Read More:
https://docs.python.org/3/library/stdtypes.html#common-sequence-operations
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COMPARING TUPLES: EXAMPLE 1

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COMPARING TUPLES: EXAMPLE 2

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LISTS VS TUPLES: SIMILARITIES
• Lists and tuples are two of the most commonly used data
structures in Python (with dictionary being the third).
• They are both sequence data types that store a collection of
items/elements.
• They can store items of any data type.
• Any item in the list or tuple is accessible via its index.

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LISTS VS TUPLES: DIFFERENCES
• Syntax difference: list -> [], tuple -> ()
• Lists are mutable while tuples are immutable (“write-
protect”).
• Cannot use list as a key in a dictionary, but tuple can be
used as dictionary keys.
• Tuple is stored in a single block of memory while list is
stored in two blocks of memory.

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HOMEWORK

Write a program to find all the common divisors of and and

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DICTIONARIES

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PYTHON DICTIONARY
• Python Dictionary: a set of key/value pairs.
• Objects in a dictionary can be values of any immutable type.
• Elements are unordered and cannot be accessed with an index.

Colon: to separate a key

my_dictionary = {"A":90, "B":80, "C":70, "F":40}

value
enclose keys and values separate items with a
with a curly brackets comma (,)

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KEYS AND VALUES

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EXTRACTING VALUES FROM DICTIONARY
• Dictionary values are accessed by key

>>> my_dictionary = {"A":90, "B":80, "C":70, "F":40}

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ADDING AND MODIFYING AN ITEM

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DICTIONARY UPDATE()
<dictionary1>.update(<dictionary2>)

• add element(s) to the dictionary if the key is not in the dictionary.

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UPDATE()

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DICTIONARY AND FOR-LOOP

Length: the
number of items

Not ordered!

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SORTING BY KEYS

Ordered by
keys!

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ITEMS() FUNCTION
• item(): to get a list of tuples with key-pair values

[source]

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 CONVERT LISTS INTO KEY:VALUE PAIR
Sample Code:
my_keys = ["Staff ID", "Staff Name", "Department", "Office"]
my_values = ["100955885", "Ali Baba", "Finance", "Room 1002"]

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Output:
dictionary : {'Staff ID': '100955885', 'Staff Name': 'Ali Baba', 'Department': 'Finance', 'Office': 'Room 1002'}

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CLASS PRACTICE
Sample Code:

Output:

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DICTIONARY UNPACKING: EXAMPLE 1

Unpack operator
(**)

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DICTIONARY UNPACKING: EXAMPLE 2

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