What if you want to check whether a specific element exists in the Tuple? Does Python provide any built-in methods for this? No, it does not have any method for the lookup.

To check if a tuple contains an element, use the membership “in” operator. It returns True if an element exists, and False otherwise.

The syntax is simple: if element in tuple, where element is the one we need to find in the tuple.

main_tuple = (11, 19, "Image_gen4", 3.14)

print("Image_gen4" in main_tuple)
 # Output: True

print("world" in main_tuple)
# Output: False

In the above code, we checked if the “Image_gen4” string element exists in the tuple.

The element does exist, and hence the “in” operator returns True.

The “world” element does not exist, so it returns False.

Time complexity is O(n) since we search linearly in the tuple. So, it depends on the number of total elements (n) in the tuple.

What about frequency membership checks?

If your current task requires frequent element checks in the tuple and contains hashable elements (numbers, strings, or tuples of hashables, etc.), you can convert the tuple into a set and then use the “in” operator.

But you will have a question: Why do we need to convert in the first place? Well, set lookup is extremely fast and has a time complexity of O(1). So, it would be easy to search in a set rather than a tuple.

Initial conversion to a set is O(n), which takes time and memory. After the conversion, you can check as many times as you want without losing time.

main_tuple = (11, 19, "Image_gen4", 3.14)

# Converting tuple to set
tuple_set = set(main_tuple)

print("Image_gen4" in tuple_set)
 # Output: True

print("world" in tuple_set)
# Output: False

Handling unhashable elements

If you are working with a tuple that contains unhashable elements like lists, you can’t convert the tuple into a set. In that scenario, stick to the “in” operator and check the element’s existence.

main_tuple = ([21, 19], ["Image_gen4", "Flux"], 3.14)

print([21, 19] in main_tuple)
 # Output: True

print(["mid", "Flux"] in main_tuple)
# Output: False

Checking for NaN (Not a Number)

NaN is a special floating value represented by undefined or unrepresentable numerical results. Since nobody knows what NaN is, NaN != NaN evaluates to True.

The “in” operator does not work for checking NaN values because two NaNs are different values.

To solve this tricky problem, we can use math.isnan() method with a generator expression.

A generator expression efficiently iterates through a tuple. Using the isinstance() method, it applies the math.nan() function to only floating-point numbers. For each floating-point element, math.isnan() returns True if the input element is NaN and False otherwise.

import math

tuple_nan = (float('nan'), 1, 2)

has_nan = any(math.isnan(x) for x in tuple_nan if isinstance(x, float))

print(has_nan)  
# Output: True

That’s all!