Loris wrote: "Yes, I was mistakenly thinking that the popping the element would leave me with the dict minus the popped key-value pair. Seem like there is no such function."
Others have tried to explain and pointed out you can del and then use the changed dict. But consider the odd concept of writing your own trivial function. def remaining(adict, anitem): _ = adict.pop(anitem) # alternatively duse del on dict and item return adict >>> remaining({"first": 1, "second": 2, "third": 3}, "second") {'first': 1, 'third': 3} Or do you want to be able to call it as in dict.remaining(key) by subclassing your own variant of dict and adding a similar method? -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list