How can I ignore extra tuple items when deserializing with Serde? ("trailing characters" error)

You can implement a custom Visitor which ignores rest of the sequence. Be aware that the whole sequence must be consumed. This is an important part (try to remove it and you'll get same error):

// This is very important!
while let Some(IgnoredAny) = seq.next_element()? {
    // Ignore rest
}

Here's a working example:

use std::fmt;

use serde::de::{self, Deserialize, Deserializer, IgnoredAny, SeqAccess, Visitor};
use serde::Serialize;

#[derive(Serialize, Debug)]
pub struct MyTuple(String, i32);

impl<'de> Deserialize<'de> for MyTuple {
    fn deserialize<D>(deserializer: D) -> Result<Self, D::Error>
    where
        D: Deserializer<'de>,
    {
        struct MyTupleVisitor;

        impl<'de> Visitor<'de> for MyTupleVisitor {
            type Value = MyTuple;

            fn expecting(&self, formatter: &mut fmt::Formatter) -> fmt::Result {
                formatter.write_str("struct MyTuple")
            }

            fn visit_seq<V>(self, mut seq: V) -> Result<Self::Value, V::Error>
            where
                V: SeqAccess<'de>,
            {
                let s = seq
                    .next_element()?
                    .ok_or_else(|| de::Error::invalid_length(0, &self))?;
                let n = seq
                    .next_element()?
                    .ok_or_else(|| de::Error::invalid_length(1, &self))?;

                // This is very important!
                while let Some(IgnoredAny) = seq.next_element()? {
                    // Ignore rest
                }

                Ok(MyTuple(s, n))
            }
        }

        deserializer.deserialize_seq(MyTupleVisitor)
    }
}

fn main() {
    let two_elements = r#"["foo", 123]"#;
    let three_elements = r#"["foo", 123, "bar"]"#;

    let tuple: MyTuple = serde_json::from_str(two_elements).unwrap();
    assert_eq!(tuple.0, "foo");
    assert_eq!(tuple.1, 123);

    let tuple: MyTuple = serde_json::from_str(three_elements).unwrap();
    assert_eq!(tuple.0, "foo");
    assert_eq!(tuple.1, 123);
}