acting on items passed to a method via a dictiomary

[Donnal Walter]

The following method is defined in one of my classes:

     def setup(self, items={}):
         """perform setup based on a dictionary of items"""
         if 'something' in items:
             value = items['something']
             # now do something with value
         if 'another' in items:
             value = items['another']
             # do something else with value
         if 'spam' in items:
             value = items['spam']
             # do yet another thing with value
         if 'eggs' in items:
             value = items['eggs']
             # and so on

The purpose is to set up the object based on values contained in a 
dictionary passed to the setup() method. The dictionary may be empty, or 
it may contain a variable number of items, and it may contain items not 
looked for by the setup() method. Moreover, this method may be 
overridden in subclasses. The approach described above works ok, so I 
suppose I should leave well enough alone, but I have this nagging 
feeling that Python has a way to do this more simply or more elegantly. 
Any suggestion?

Donnal Walter
Arkansas Children's Hospital