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

Not sure how pythonic this is but until there is a first function in the library I include this in the source:

first = lambda l, default=None: next(iter(l or []), default)

It's just one line (conforms to black) and avoids dependencies.