Concise Way To Access A Dictionary Value When The Key Is Unknown

I have a bunch of big dictionaries with keys that are strings of text. Each key value pair has an identical format. I frequently end up needing to print out one of the values to

Solution 1:

Since you are using Python 3 (where dict.values does not return a full fledged list), you can get an arbitrary value in a memory efficient way with

next(iter(d.values()))

If there's a chance that the dictionary might have no values, wrap it in a helper function that catches the StopIteration, i.e.:

def get_arb_value(dic):
    try:
        return next(iter(dic.values()))
    except StopIteration:
        # do whatever you like 

The Python 2 equivalent of next(iter(dic.values())) would be next(dic.itervalues()).

Solution 2:

You could simply do this:

list(d.values())[0]

In other words, take all the values, convert to a list, take the first one.