Getting only element from a single-element list in Python?
Raises exception if not exactly one item:
Sequence unpacking:
singleitem, = mylist# Identical in behavior (byte code produced is the same),# but arguably more readable since a lone trailing comma could be missed:[singleitem] = mylist
All others silently ignore spec violation, producing first or last item:
Explicit use of iterator protocol:
singleitem = next(iter(mylist))
Destructive pop:
singleitem = mylist.pop()
Negative index:
singleitem = mylist[-1]
Set via single iteration for
(because the loop variable remains available with its last value when a loop terminates):
for singleitem in mylist: break
Rampant insanity:
# But also the only way to retrieve a single item and raise an exception on failure# for too many, not just too few, elements as an expression, rather than a statement,# without resorting to defining/importing functions elsewhere to do the worksingleitem = (lambda x: x)(*mylist)
There are many others (combining or varying bits of the above, or otherwise relying on implicit iteration), but you get the idea.
I will add that the more_itertools
library has a tool that returns one item from an iterable.
from more_itertools import oneiterable = ["foo"]one(iterable)# "foo"
In addition, more_itertools.one
raises an error if the iterable is empty or has more than one item.
iterable = []one(iterable)# ValueError: not enough values to unpack (expected 1, got 0)iterable = ["foo", "bar"]one(iterable)# ValueError: too many values to unpack (expected 1)
more_itertools
is a third-party package > pip install more-itertools