Django Python – What does _ do after a variable name

Sorry for my poor explanation but I’m reviewing my professor’s code like this:

              user, _ = User.objects.get_or_create(
                      name = serializer.data['name'],
                      email = serializer.data['email'],
                      password = make_password(serializer.data['password']))

when I remove the ", _" from that I can’t access the objects (eg: name) of it. I was doing
"user.name" but I cant without the ", _" can someone explain why that is.
It’s my first time here in in SO hehe

I wanna access the name field through the user where I assigned the object I created

>Solution :

_ is a variable, indeed _ is a valid variable name. _ is often used for "throw-away" variables: variables where we are not really interested in the result. The code you wrote is thus equivalent to:

user, created = User.objects.get_or_create(
    name=serializer.data['name'],
    email=serializer.data['email'],
    password=make_password(serializer.data['password']),
)

except that we now assigned it to a variable named created instead of _.

What is happening is that we "unpack" the 2-tuple of the result. Indeed, .get_or_create(…) ^[Django-doc] returns a 2-tuple:

Returns a tuple of (object, created), where object is the retrieved or created object and created is a boolean specifying whether a new object was created.

If you write:

x, y = some_2_tuple

it "unpacks" the some_2_tuple where x is assigned the first item of the 2-tuple, and y the second item. This can be extended to an arbitrary number of variables. For more information, see the extended iterable unpacking ^[pep].

when I remove the , _ from that I can’t access the objects (eg: name) of it. I was doing user.name.

If you remove the , _, it reads user = User.objects.get_or_create(…), so then user is a 2-tuple. You can access the user object then with user[0], so user[0].name, but likely unpacking is more convenient here.