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

There's always monkeypatching!

# Store a reference to the real library function
really_get_keywords = library.get_keywords

# Define out patched version of the function, which uses the real
# version above, adjusting its return value as necessary
def patched_get_keywords():
    """Make sure we always get a tuple of keywords."""
    result = really_get_keywords()
    return result if isinstance(result, tuple) else (result,)

# Install the patched version
library.get_keywords = patched_get_keywords

NOTE: This code might burn down your house and sleep with your wife.