get first item in iterable

programming
,

Honestly, this is definitely not the best idiom around, but I still find it useful.

If you ever find yourself writing the following code:

candidate = [x for x in iterable if "text" in x]  
if len(candidate) == 1:  
   text = candidate[0]

you can use the following method to make the code a bit cleaner:

def get_first(iterable, predicate=None, default=None):  
   if not iterable:
      return default
  
   for item in iterable:  
      if not predicate:
         return item  
      if predicate(item):  
         return item  
      return default

text = get_first(iterable, lambda x: "text" in x)