Author: manishel

Value unpacking is a very useful feature in Python. It helps make the code readable and more chic 🙂 The idioms presented here are the most common ways to use unpacking in Python and are intended to help you understand how it works and when it can be useful. These idioms work for iterables (lists, strings) and tuples. 1. Classical variable unpacking in Python The one idiom you are probably familiar with from your python course is a classical unpacking idiom, where you assign each element of an iterable (or a tuple) to a specific variable: >>> data = ("Elena", "nhoj546", "Mon, 7 Nov 2016 08:16:56 GMT", "elena@linuxnix.com", ("172.217.22.110", "http", "142.113.71.12")) >>> username, passwd, last_login, email, connection_details = data >>> username 'Elena' >>> passwd 'nhoj546' >>> connection_details ('172.217.22.110', 'http', '142.113.71.12') >>> connection_details[1] 'http' >>> ip_for, protocol, ip_by = connection_details >>> protocol 'http' >>> 2. Replace unnecessary values with "_" If you do not want to litter the namespace with additional variables you can assign the elements that you do not need to an underscore (“_”) while unpacking. The items assigned to an underscore are dropped: >>> user = "lena:x:1000:1000:lena user,,,:/home/lena:/bin/bash" >>> username, _, id, _, fullname, homedir, shell = user.split(":") >>> id '1000' >>> shell '/bin/bash' >>> 3.Wrapping several values into a list while unpacking Note: available in Python3 This idiom allows you to unpack certain values and wrap...