How to define duplicate items in a Python tuple?

Question

What are some good ways to define a tuple consisting of integers where the number of occurrences of each item is known ?

For example,

I want to define a tuple with 3 2's, 2 4's and 1, 3, 5 occur once.

For this, I can always go the manual way :

foo = (1, 2, 2, 2, 3, 4, 4, 5)

However, this becomes a bit messy when the number of items in the list is large. So, I want to know what are some ways to automate the task of generating the desired number of duplicates of each item.

Answer 1

You can do it like this:

>>> (1,) * 1 + (2,) * 3 + (4,) * 2 + (5,) * 1
(1, 2, 2, 2, 4, 4, 5)