Swift Tuples
This tutorial belongs to the Swift series
Tuples are used to group multiple values into a single collection. For example we can declare a variable dog
containing a String and an Int value:
let dog : (String, Int)
And we can initialize them with a name and an age
let dog : (String, Int) = ("Roger", 8)
But as with any other variable, the type can be inferred during initialization:
let dog = ("Roger", 8)
You can use named elements:
let dog = (name: "Roger", age: 8)
dog.name //"Roger"
dog.age //8
Once a tuple is defined, you can decompose it to individual variables in this way:
let dog = ("Roger", 8)
let (name, age) = dog
and if you need to just get one of the values, you can use the special underscore keyword to ignore the other ones:
let dog = ("Roger", 8)
let (name, _) = dog
Tuples are an awesome tool for various needs.
The most obvious one is a short way to group similar data.
Another one if those needs is returning multiple items from a function. A function can only return a single item, so a tuple is a convenient structure for that.
Another handy functionality allowed by tuples is swapping elements:
var a = 1
var b = 2
(a, b) = (b, a)
//a == 2
//b == 1
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