Elegant way to perform tuple arithmetic

user1737647 picture user1737647 · Jul 2, 2013 · Viewed 57.2k times · Source

What is the most elegant and concise way (without creating my own class with operator overloading) to perform tuple arithmetic in Python 2.7?

Lets say I have two tuples:

a = (10, 10)
b = (4, 4)

My intended result is

c = a - b = (6, 6)

I currently use:

c = (a[0] - b[0], a[1] - b[1])

I also tried:

c = tuple([(i - j) for i in a for j in b])

but the result was (6, 6, 6, 6). I believe the above works as a nested for loops resulting in 4 iterations and 4 values in the result.

Answer

vroomfondel picture vroomfondel · Jul 2, 2013

If you're looking for fast, you can use numpy:

>>> import numpy
>>> numpy.subtract((10, 10), (4, 4))
array([6, 6])

and if you want to keep it in a tuple:

>>> tuple(numpy.subtract((10, 10), (4, 4)))
(6, 6)