Swapping values

Consider this problem — two students want to swap backpacks. In real life, this is pretty easy to do. But when we are swapping values of two variables, things are a little tricky. To explain, consider these rules:

• two students need to swap backpacks
• they can only hold one backpack at a time

What happens if we try to do a simple swap?

emma = 'blue backpack'
lucy = 'red backpack'

lucy = emma
emma = lucy

When we set lucy = emma, this makes lucy point to ‘blue backpack’ and now neither variable is pointing to ‘red backpack’. Setting emma = lucy means emma points to the same thing as lucy — the blue backpack!

Solving the swap problem

To solve this problem, we need the help of a ‘third person’ or a third variable to hold one of the backpacks:

temp = lucy
lucy = emma
emma = temp

The Python way of swapping

The swapping solution above is used in many programming languages. In Python, we can use tuple unpacking to swap two variables:

emma, lucy = lucy, emma

This creates a tuple (lucy, emma), and then unpacks the tuple into emma, lucy. Python takes care of any temporary variables it uses while it makes this swap.