Now, let’s try doing the same things to a tuple. We know that a tuple is immutable, so some of these operations shouldn’t work. We’ll take a new tuple for this purpose.
>>> mytuple=0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7
First, let’s try reassigning the second element.
>>> mytuple[1]=3
Traceback (most recent call last):
File “<pyshell#70>”, line 1, in <module>
mytuple[1]=3
TypeError: ‘tuple’ object does not support item assignment
As you can see, a tuple doesn’t support item assignment.
However, we can reassign an entire tuple.
>>> mytuple=2,3,4,5,6
>>> mytuple
(2, 3, 4, 5, 6)
Next, let’s try slicing a tuple to access or delete it.
>>> mytuple[3:]
(5, 6)
>>> del mytuple[3:]
Traceback (most recent call last):
File “<pyshell#74>”, line 1, in <module>
del mytuple[3:]
TypeError: ‘tuple’ object does not support item deletion
As is visible, we can slice it to access it, but we can’t delete a slice. This is because it is immutable.
Can we delete a single element?
>>> del mytuple[3]
Traceback (most recent call last):
File “<pyshell#75>”, line 1, in <module>
del mytuple[3]
TypeError: ‘tuple’ object doesn’t support item deletion
Apparently, the answer is no.
Finally, let’s try deleting the entire tuple.
>>> del mytuple
>>> mytuple
Traceback (most recent call last):
File “<pyshell#77>”, line 1, in <module>
mytuple
NameError: name ‘mytuple’ is not defined
So, here, we conclude that you can slice a tuple, reassign it whole, or delete it whole.
But you cannot delete or reassign just a few elements or a slice.
Let us proceed with more differences between python tuples vs lists.
