> For the complete documentation index, see [llms.txt](https://haskell.hpmeducation.com/llms.txt). Markdown versions of documentation pages are available by appending `.md` to page URLs; this page is available as [Markdown](https://haskell.hpmeducation.com/defining-functions-working-with-functions/pattern-matching/tuple-patterns.md).

# Tuple Patterns

We can think of a tuple pattern as a tuple of lower-level patterns – the lower-level patterns match individual elements in the tuple. That tuple of patterns itself makes a full pattern that matches any tuple **with the same length and whose elements match the internal patterns**. We could use tuple patterns for functions that return the suit and the rank of a playing card represented by a tuple:

```haskell
getSuit :: (String, String) -> String
getSuit (suit, _) = suit

getRank :: (String, String) -> String
getRank (_, rank) = rank

ghci> getSuit ("Hearts", "Ace")
"Hearts"
ghci> getRank ("Hearts", "Ace")
"Ace"
```

We check that the tuple passed in is of arity two, and then return the first or second element depending on what we want to get.