Sort a Tuple in Python – With Examples

Tuples, like lists, are an ordered collection of items in Python. That is, there is an order to which the elements are present inside a tuple. There might be use-cases where you’d want to sort a tuple in a particular order (for example, ascending or descending). In this tutorial, we will look at how to sort elements of a tuple in Python with the help of some examples.

How to sort a tuple in Python?

Tuples are immutable in Python and thus cannot be altered after creation. You can, however, use the Python built-in sorted() function to create a sorted copy of the original tuple. The following is the syntax.

# create a tuple with sorted elements from tuple a
tuple(sorted(a))

The sorted() function returns a list of elements in a sorted order which can further be converted to a tuple using the tuple() function.

Let’s look at some examples.

Sort tuple in ascedning order

The sorted() function, by default, sorts an iterable in ascending order and returns the sorted elements as a list. Let’s use it to sort a tuple in ascending order.

# creat a tuple of numbers
a = (2, 4, 3, 5, 1)
# sort the tuple elements and store the result in variable a
a = tuple(sorted(a))
print(a)

Output:

(1, 2, 3, 4, 5)

Here we reassign the returned tuple to the original variable a which now contains elements sorted in ascending order.

Sort tuple in descending order

You can similarly get a tuple with elements sorted in descending order by passing reverse=True to the sorted() function. The reverse parameter is False by default.

# creat a tuple of numbers
a = (2, 4, 3, 5, 1)
# sort the tuple elements in descending sorder and store the result in variable a
a = tuple(sorted(a, reverse=True))
print(a)

Output:

(5, 4, 3, 2, 1)

The tuple a now contains elements sorted in descending order.

Keep in mind that tuples are immutable. Here the sorted() function returns the sorted elements in a list which we are converting to a tuple using the tuple() function.

You might also be interested in –

• Python List Sort – With Examples
• Python – Check If List Is Sorted Or Not
• Sort List of Strings Alphabetically in Python