[Python-Dev] Retrieve an arbitrary element from a set without removing it (original) (raw)

Nick Coghlan ncoghlan at gmail.com
Wed Oct 28 07:42:40 CET 2009


Alexander Belopolsky wrote:

Odd indeed. My first reaction was: it is not needed because lists support slicing, but when I tried to construct a list.get() using slicing the best I could come up with was the following hack

def lget(l, i, v): return (l[i:] or [v])[0] ... lget(range(10), 20, 200) 200 lget(range(10), 5, 50) 5 Yet for some reason I never missed this functionality ...

People tend to do length checks on lists to decide which items are and are not present. You can't do that with a dict.

Cheers, Nick.

-- Nick Coghlan | ncoghlan at gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia



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