"Justin Shaw" <wyojustin at hotmail.com> wrote in message news:<j_ucnfM2bJwucO6jXTWcoA at comcast.com>... > Why doesn't popitem take a key argument that defaults to None? Perhaps because it wasn't designed to do what you want and/or because None is a valid key. > Or how > should I pop a particular item out of a dict? v = d[k] del d[k]