What is the purpose of the single underscore “_” variable in Python?

_ has 4 main conventional uses in Python:

1. To hold the result of the last executed expression(/statement) in an interactive interpreter session. This precedent was set by the standard CPython interpreter, and other interpreters have followed suit
2. For translation lookup in i18n (see the gettext documentation for example), as in code like: raise forms.ValidationError(_("Please enter a correct username"))
3. As a general purpose “throwaway” variable name to indicate that part of a function result is being deliberately ignored (Conceptually, it is being discarded.), as in code like: label, has_label, _ = text.partition(':').
4. As part of a function definition (using either def or lambda), where the signature is fixed (e.g. by a callback or parent class API), but this particular function implementation doesn’t need all of the parameters, as in code like: callback = lambda _: True