What's the best practice for handling single-value tuples in Python?

Question

I am using a 3rd party library function which reads a set of keywords from a file, and is supposed to return a tuple of values. It does this correctly as long as there are at le

Answer 1

Your tuple_maker doesn't do what you think it does. An equivalent definition of tuple maker to yours is

def tuple_maker(input):
    return input

What you're seeing is that tuple_maker("a string") returns a string, while tuple_maker(["str1","str2","str3"]) returns a list of strings; neither return a tuple!

Tuples in Python are defined by the presence of commas, not brackets. Thus (1,2) is a tuple containing the values 1 and 2, while (1,) is a tuple containing the single value 1.

To convert a value to a tuple, as others have pointed out, use tuple.

>>> tuple([1])
(1,)
>>> tuple([1,2])
(1,2)