Pythonic way to access arbitrary element from dictionary

Question

I have a dictionary, full of items. I want to peek at a single, arbitrary item:

print("Amongst our dictionary\'s items are such diverse elements as: %s&q         


        

Answer 1

Why not use random?

import random

def arb(dictionary):
    return random.choice(dictionary.values())

This makes it very clear that the result is meant to be purely arbitrary and not an implementation side-effect. Until performance becomes an actual issue, always go with clarity over speed.

It's a shame that dict_values don't support indexing, it'd be nice to be able to pass in the value view instead.

Update: since everyone is so obsessed with performance, the above function takes <120ms to return a random value from a dict of 1 million items. Relying on clear code is not the amazing performance hit it's being made out to be.