"can't use starred expression here"

Question

I would like to return two things instead of a list of two elements. I could use return sorted_list[0], sorted_list[1] but I guess it would be less time-efficient. So I wanted to unpack the list directly in the return statement to time the two solutions and pick the quickest one but it doesn't work. Here is a minimal reproducible example:

def sort_two_str(str1: str, str2: str):
    return *sorted((str1, str2))

if __name__ == "__main__":
    print(sort_two_str("A2", "A1"))

Output:

  File "path/to/file.py", line 2
    return *sorted((str1, str2))
           ^
SyntaxError: can't use starred expression here

Answer 1

You can't return two things... Also I suggest avoid thinking about these micro-optimizations.

If you return an iterable which has two items, you can then unpack it like:

a, b = func()

Interestingly if you add a single , after your expression, it becomes valid. In fact it gets turned into tuple.

def sort_two_str(str1: str, str2: str):
    return *sorted((str1, str2)),