Stefan Behnel wrote:
It would therefore be nice to have a common ".any()" method on data structures that would just read an arbitrary item from a container.
I'd advise against bare name "any" for this, since we already have the any() builtin with a completely different meaning. "getany" would probably be OK though. I'd also advise against using a method for this, since there is a reasonable default implementation that can be employed: def getany(container) if container: if isinstance(container, collections.Sequence): return container[0] else: for x in container: return x raise ValueError("No items in container") Finally, I'd suggest that any such function would belong in the collections module rather than being made a builtin. Cheers, Nick. -- Nick Coghlan | ncoghlan@gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia ---------------------------------------------------------------