Tuples In C#

What is tuple and when it was introduced?

A tuple is a new data type introduced by .NET Framework 4.0. When there is a requirement to store the multiple values of different data types and without having to create a class to store the values, we can go with tuple. Simply “Tuple is a container with the similar or different data type, which supports 7 items (similar/different data types) plus 1 Tuple type”. Point to be noted here is, it is not a collection.

How to declare a tuple?

Tuple will be declared similar to Dictionary<Tkey, TValue>.

Tuple<T1>
Tuple<T1, T2>
Tuple<T1, T2, T3>
Tuple<T1, T2, T3, T4>
Tuple<T1, T2, T3, T4, T5>
Tuple<T1, T2, T3, T4, T5, T6>
Tuple<T1, T2, T3, T4, T5, T6, T7>
Tuple<T1, T2, T3, T4, T5, T6, T7, TRest>

Here, T can be any type and TRest is a Tuple type.

If you have seen it, while declaring a tuple, you will get 8 override functions, as shown below.

In the last override method, we can add 7 types with one Tuple type (I will explain in detail with an example). 

The method given above will return all the arithmetic results of the provided values (a, b).

How to read tuple

Once you have added values into tuple, it is easy to retrieve the data from it. Tuple stores the data in “Item” property. From the example given above, we can get the values, as shown below.

A Tuple with more than 7 arguments.

The 8^th type of a tuple is tuple.

Observe the example given below. We have a tuple called dataWithEightarguments with 8 parameters in which 8th one is a tuple. Hence, while adding data to it, we need to pass tuple type data as 8^th parameter.