In what case would I use a tuple as a dictionary key?

Answer #1:

Classic Example: You want to store point value as tuple of (x, y)

Answer #2:

salaries = {}
salaries[('John', 'Smith')] = 10000.0
salaries[('John', 'Parker')] = 99999.0

EDIT 1
Of course you can do salaries['John Smith'] = whatever, but then you’ll have to do extra work to separate the key into first and last names. What about pointColor[(x, y, z)] = "red", here the benefit of tuple key is more prominent.

I must stress out that this is not the best practice. In many cases you better create special classes to handle situations like that, but Arrieta asked for examples, which I gave her (him).

EDIT 0

By the way, each tuple element has to be hashable too:

>>> d = {}
>>> t = (range(3), range(10, 13))
>>> d[t] = 11
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
TypeError: list objects are unhashable
>>>

Answer #3:

I use tuple lots of time as dict key e.g.

• I do use them when I have to create a unique key from multiple values e.g.

  based on first_name, last_name key could be key = '%s_%s'%(first_name, last_name) but better way is key = (first_name, last_name) because

  1. It is more readable, shorter and less computation
  2. It is easier to retrieve the individual values
  3. Most importantly key = '%s_%s'%(first_name, last_name) is wrong and may not give unique keys for all values of first_name and last_name e.g. when values contain _

• Caching the results of a function

  def func(a1, b1):
      if (a1,b1) in cache: return cache[(a1,b1)]
      ...
  

Answer #4:

I used tuples as dictionary keys in application that compares network devices by geographical location. Since the devices are named similarly for each location, it provides a natural way to know if a device matching that pairing has been seen yet while processing multiples.

i.e.

seen = {}
seen[('abc', 'lax')] = 1
seen[('xyz', 'nyc')] = 1

Answer #5:

You use tuples as keys when you want to show multiple elements which form a key together.

Eg: {(<x-coordinate>,<y-coordinate>): <indicating letter>}

Here if we use x-coordinate or y-coordinate separately, we wouldn’t be representing that point.

Answer #6:

In the context of Machine Learning and Deep Learning, if you’re doing hyperparameter search for the best hyperparameters, then using tuples as keys is definitely super useful.

Let’s say you’re searching for the best hyperparameter combination for learning_rate, regularization_factor, and model_complexity.

Then you can have a dictionary in Python where you make the different combination that these hparams can take as keys and their corresponding weight matrices from the training algorithm as values

hparams_hist = {}
hparams_hist[(0.001, 0.7, 5)] = weight_matrix1
hparams_hist[(0.0001, 0.8, 2)] = weight_matrix2

These weight matrices are further needed to make realtime prediction.

Answer #7:

a[("John", "Doe")] = "123 Fake Street"

Answer #8:

I suppose in the case of sorting, there could be merit in using a tuple. For example, suppose the dictionary key represents a sort field (obviously there would be a default sort field to prevent the key from being None). If you needed multiple sort fields, such as the case of sorting by last name, then first name, wouldn’t using a tuple as the dictionary key be a good idea?

Sure, such an idea might have limited use, but that doesn’t mean it is completely useless.