Roy Smith <r...@panix.com> wrote: > A common convention > is that when you're unpacking a tuple (or a list, I suppose) and are > only interested in some of the elements, you unpack the others into "_". > Thus: > > _, _, _, _, pid, _, _, _ = recs[19]
Pre-namedtuple, I used to like using named slices for this: cPID = slice(19) pid = recs[cPID] cHostPort = slice(99,100) host, port = recs[cHostPort] etc. The suggestions of having your query return a dictionary where possible are the most ideal, but if it's not possible you can always wrap the result tuple in a namedtuple: from collections import namedtuple Staff = namedtuple('Staff', ['firstname','lastname','age','position']) sql_result = ('John', 'Example', '30', 'Dummy') staff_record = Staff(sql_result) print staff_record.firstname, staff_record.age -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list