How to Use Zip to Manipulate a List of Tuples

Unlock the Power of Zip to Gain more Flexibility over Your Data

Khuyen Tran
Level Up Coding
Published in
4 min readFeb 26, 2020

--

Photo by Tomas Sobek on Unsplash

Motivation

Let’s assume when analyzing Twitter data, we get a list of tuples, with the first element contains the frequency of the words and the second element contains the words.

We would like to visualize this data with the y-axis the frequency of the words and the x-axis the text

To create the graph above, it might be wise to get a list of Tweets and another list of frequency, with tweet[i] corresponding to its frequency freq[i], then pass the 2 lists to the arguments in Matplotlib.

How could that be done?

First Attempt with List Comprehension

We store the list of tuples above in freq_tweets. We could use list comprehension to access the first value of each tuple and create the frequency list:

freq = [x[0] for x in freq_tweets]
freq

And do the same thing with the list of tweets

tweet = [x[1] for x in freq_tweets]

--

--