[Python-ideas] data structures should have an .any() method

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Sun, 6 Sep 2009 03:51:43 pm Greg Ewing wrote:
> Nick Coghlan wrote:
> > That said, I'm -0 on the idea overall. If someone actually needs
> > it, it isn't particularly hard for them to write their own getany()
> > function.
>
> There's a situation where the need to do this kind of
> thing actually arises fairly frequently -- retrieving
> things from a relational database. Often you're
> expecting exactly one result from a query, but the
> API always gives you a sequence, which you then have
> to get the first item from. Doing that over and
> over again gets rather tedious.

If you're expecting "exactly one result", then surely it should be an 
error to receive more than one result? Rather than ask for "any" result 
and ignoring any unexpected extra items, I think it would be better to 
have a helper function that verifies you have got exactly one result.



-- 
Steven D'Aprano