[Django]-How does the get_or_create function in Django return two values?

30👍

get_or_create() simply returns a tuple of the two values. You can then use sequence unpacking to bind the two tuple entries to two names, like in the documentation example:

p, created = Person.objects.get_or_create(
    first_name='John', last_name='Lennon',
    defaults={'birthday': date(1940, 10, 9)})

6👍

It returns a tuple. It sounds like you knew that functions could do this, just not that you could assign the results directly to two variables!

See the Django documentation for get_or_create:

# Returns a tuple of (object, created), where object is the retrieved 
# or created object and created is a boolean specifying whether a new 
# object was created.

obj, created = Person.objects.get_or_create(first_name='John', last_name='Lennon',
                  defaults={'birthday': date(1940, 10, 9)})
👤AP257

4👍

Using tuples/tuple unpacking is often considered as a quite “pythonic” way of returning more than one value.

Leave a comment