On Wed, 13 Jan 2016 03:50 am, Nick Mellor wrote: > Hi all, > > Seemingly simple problem: > > There is a case in my code where I know a dictionary has only one item in > it. I want to get the value of that item, whatever the key is.
[snip examples] > None of this feels like the "one, and preferably only one, obvious way to > do it" we all strive for. Any other ideas? That's because this is a somewhat weird case. A dict with only one item that you don't know the key of? Who does that? (Well, apart from you, obviously.) Three solutions: item = d.popitem()[1] # But this modifies the dict. # Use tuple rather than list for efficiency. item = tuple(d.values())[0] Probably the best solution, because it will conveniently raise an exception if your assumption that the dict has exactly one item is wrong: item, = d.values() # Note the comma after "item". The comma turns the assignment into sequence unpacking. Normally we would write something like this: a, b, c, d = four_items but you can unpack a sequence of one item too. If you really want to make it obvious that the comma isn't a typo: (item,) = d.values() -- Steven -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
