Neat way of popping key, value PAIR from dictionary?

Question

pop is a great little function that, when used on dictionaries (given a known key) removes the item with that key from the dictionary and also returns the corre

Answer 1

A heap supports the pop-min operation you describe. You'll need to create a heap from your dictionary first, though.

import heapq
# Must be two steps; heapify modifies its argument in-place.
# Reversing the key and the value because the value will actually be
# the "key" in the heap. (Or rather, tuples are compared 
# lexicographically, so put the value in the first position.)
heap = [(v, k) for k, v in some_dict.items()]
heapq.heapify(heap)

# Get the smallest item from the heap
value, key = heapq.heappop(heap)