Extracting the a value from a tuple when the other values are unused

Question

I have a tuple foo which contains something I don\'t care about and something I do.

foo = (something_i_dont_need, something_i_need)

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Answer 1

Another possibility is to create a named tuple and use that in your return value. Then you can access the value you want by "name."

MyTuple = collections.namedtuple('MyTuple', 'ignored needed')

Then you can make

foo = (something_i_dont_need, something_i_need)

into

foo = MyTuple(something_i_dont_need, something_i_need)

and then say

x = foo.needed

instead of

x = foo[1]

Performance-wise, this may not be the best. But I think it can sometimes make writing and understanding the code easier. And it is an alternative to some of the other solutions.