Matteo Dell'Amico wrote:
You can do next(iter(container)) (or iter(container).next() with python <= 2.5). This works fine with any iterable.
This and other responses miss part of Stefan's complaint: that creating an iterator (which isn't always cheap) only to throw it away almost immediately may be a somewhat wasteful operation. The shorthand expression above also suffers from the obscurity that Stefan was complaining about - there is very little to hint that "next(iter(obj))" means "get an arbitrary object out of a container". The StopIteration exception this approach will throw for an empty container is also rather unhelpful. That said, I'm -0 on the idea overall. If someone actually needs it, it isn't particularly hard for them to write their own getany() function. Cheers, Nick. -- Nick Coghlan | ncoghlan@gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia ---------------------------------------------------------------