Tuples can put you in difficulty.

They are two examples of sequence data types in python.

Today I will tell about tuples.

A tuple consists of a number of values separated by commas.

The biggest problem is when we do not know the number of these values ​​or type.

Let me illustrate with a function that returns a tuple.

This is a known tuple but we will use like an unknown tuple.

Let's see the python code and some errors:

>>> import sys
>>> if hasattr(sys, 'version_info'):
...     print sys.version_info()
... 
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 2, in <module>
TypeError: 'tuple' object is not callable

Is very correct to got this error.

And the result using the print function:

>>> if hasattr(sys, 'version_info'):
...     print "%s" % str(sys.version_info)
... 
(2, 6, 4, 'final', 0) 

>>> if hasattr(sys, 'version_info'):
...     sys.stderr.write("%s" % str(sys.version_info))
... 
(2, 6, 4, 'final', 0)>>> 

or if you can use the repr function.

>>> if hasattr(sys, 'version_info'):
...     sys.stderr.write("%s" % repr(sys.version_info))
... 
(2, 6, 4, 'final', 0)>>> 

The official Python documentation says __repr__ is used to compute the “official” string representation of an object and __str__ is used to compute the “informal” string representation of an object.

In my opinion , the correct way it's to use repr. For example:

>>> import datetime
>>> today = datetime.datetime.now()
>>> str(today)
'2012-10-02 22:45:57.634977'
>>> repr(today)
'datetime.datetime(2012, 10, 2, 22, 45, 57, 634977)'

As we see all values from tuples it's show.