Python Jumpstart by Building 10 Apps Transcripts
Chapter: App 5: Real-time weather client
Lecture: Multiple values from a function
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Well, here we are. We've got our city, state, and country, but our function over here, it just returns one thing: a
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string. Or something else, a number or whatever. Functions just return one thing, actually, sorry, this one, but same idea: returns one thing.
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How can we take all that data that we've gathered, the city, state, and country and return them back?
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Well, what we can do is we can create something called a tuple. So a tuple, we'll call this "loc" for a minute, the way we create this in Python,
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we would just say "separate things by commas", and then we could actually return that one thing like this. Let's see what we get if we do this.
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We say Portland, Oregon, USA. Look what the location is. It looks a little bit like a list, but it has parentheses instead of square brackets,
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which means you can.. it means it's a tuple. but the limitations are you can read the values of it, but you can't add to it and stuff.
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But other than that, you can kind of think of it as like a list a little bit. So this is cool.
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And then up here, we have to say we get our one location, but what we really want is the city, state and country. So on the other hand,
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on the reverse side, once I have a tuple, I have this really cool thing that I can do in Python, It's called tuple unpacking. So I can say
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"city, state, country equals location". And then let's just print out these things here, see what we got. If We come over here in Portland,
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Oregon, USA, look what we get when we print this out right there. That's those three things just with a space between them,
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that's how print works if you just put multiple things into it. But they all came back into city,
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state and country. We could even put a break point right here, at the debug, and notice city is Portland, state is Oregon,
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Country is USA, perfect. Now, We don't need these intermediate steps, Actually. I just wrote them so it's really clear what was going on.
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So what I want to do is I just want to say for the moment, city, state, country equals that, and the tuple unpacking will just happen automatically,
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and then down here we created the location and we returned it. We can also just do you like that. We don't need this anymore, okay?
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So one more time. Here we go. We got them back exactly as we had hoped. So how do we return multiple values from here? We just return a tuple.