How to make the number of return values to a variable
Consider a normal function:
def function(stuff):
return result
To call it and get the result in a variable:
variable = function(stuff)
I can do the same with 3 results (for example):
def function(stuff):
return result1, result2, result3
To call it and get the results in three variables:
variable1, variable2, variable3 = function(stuff)
My question is, how can I write a function that reads and changes automatically when I set a variable called "number of results". Or, in my real case, the "number of results" will depend on the length of my variable (the variable is a list of arrays).
Hopefully this question hasn't been answered before.
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You can create list
with as many items as you want, then return tuple(yourList)
.
However, you can simply return immediately list
. Python idiomatically doesn't care about the return types of things, so any caller looking for an iterable like tuple
can iterate over as well list
.
A list
can also be unpacked:
>>> foo(3)
[1, 2, 3]
>>> a, b, c = foo(3)
>>> a
1
>>> b
2
>>> c
3
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Just create and return a results container (like tuple
or list
):
For example:
import random
def function(stuff):
number_of_results = random.randrange(1, 4)
results = tuple(random.randint(0, 100) for _ in range(number_of_results))
return results
for _ in range(5):
print(function(None))
Output example:
(0, 28) (66,) (62, 63, 88) (99, 89, 67) (87, 91)
If you want to assign return
ed values to separate variables, you can, but know how many functions will be returned. For example, if you somehow knew in advance he was going to return three things you could write: variable1, variable2, variable3 = function(stuff)
. For this reason, it would probably be better to just expect it to return the container and process its contents after the function call.
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