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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-07T13:25:07+00:00

Possible Duplicate: How can I get around declaring an unused variable in a for

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Possible Duplicate:
How can I get around declaring an unused variable in a for loop?

In Python what is the best practice for naming a variable that is not going to be used? This is an odd question sure, but for my specific case I have a tuple of (key, value) where I am only interested in the value. A basic demo of my use case:

some_stuff = [("key", "value"), ("key2", "value")]
for _, value in some_stuff:
    pass  # TODO: do something really important with value

I’ve noticed in Eclipse that naming a variable _ or with an _ prefix (e.g. _k) will not show an unused variable warning and removing the _ prefix causes the warning to be raised, but this may just be an oddity/”feature” in Eclipse rather than Python best practice..

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Not sure if this is a Eclipse thing or not, but I generally use '_' to denote values I don’t care about (i.e., return values in tuples, or index values in for-loops).

    Of course you can always resort to old stand-bys like naming variables dummy or ignore.

    I’m not sure if PEP 8 mentions anything about this, might be worth peeking into.

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