Python idiom to return first item or None

Question

I\'m sure there\'s a simpler way of doing this that\'s just not occurring to me.

I\'m calling a bunch of methods that return a list. The list may be empty. If the

Answer 1

If you find yourself trying to pluck the first thing (or None) from a list comprehension you can switch to a generator to do it like:

next((x for x in blah if cond), None)

Pro: works if blah isn't indexable Con: it's unfamiliar syntax. It's useful while hacking around and filtering stuff in ipython though.