Access an arbitrary element in a dictionary in Python

On Python 3, non-destructively and iteratively:

next(iter(mydict.values()))

On Python 2, non-destructively and iteratively:

mydict.itervalues().next()

If you want it to work in both Python 2 and 3, you can use the six package:

six.next(six.itervalues(mydict))

though at this point it is quite cryptic and I'd rather prefer your code.

If you want to remove any item, do:

key, value = mydict.popitem()

Note that "first" may not be an appropriate term here because dict is not an ordered type in Python < 3.6. Python 3.6+ dicts are ordered.

If you only need to access one element (being the first by chance, since dicts do not guarantee ordering) you can simply do this in Python 2:

my_dict.keys()[0]    # key of "first" element
my_dict.values()[0]  # value of "first" element
my_dict.items()[0]   # (key, value) tuple of "first" element

Please note that (at best of my knowledge) Python does not guarantee that 2 successive calls to any of these methods will return list with the same ordering. This is not supported with Python3.

in Python 3:

list(my_dict.keys())[0]    # key of "first" element
list(my_dict.values())[0]  # value of "first" element
list(my_dict.items())[0]   # (key, value) tuple of "first" element

In python3, The way :

dict.keys() 

return a value in type : dict_keys(), we'll got an error when got 1st member of keys of dict by this way:

dict.keys()[0]
TypeError: 'dict_keys' object does not support indexing

Finally, I convert dict.keys() to list @1st, and got 1st member by list splice method:

list(dict.keys())[0]

As others mentioned, there is no "first item", since dictionaries have no guaranteed order (they're implemented as hash tables). If you want, for example, the value corresponding to the smallest key, thedict[min(thedict)] will do that. If you care about the order in which the keys were inserted, i.e., by "first" you mean "inserted earliest", then in Python 3.1 you can use collections.OrderedDict, which is also in the forthcoming Python 2.7; for older versions of Python, download, install, and use the ordered dict backport (2.4 and later) which you can find here.

Python 3.7 Now dicts are insertion ordered.