Delete A Key From A Dictionary In Python
Top recommened way to delete a key in a python dictionary is:
(via: https://stackoverflow.com/a/11277439/102401)
To delete a key regardless of whether it is in the dictionary, use the two-argument form of dict.pop():
my_dict.pop('key', None)
This will return my_dict[key] if key exists in the dictionary, and None otherwise. If the second parameter is not specified (ie. my_dict.pop('key')) and key does not exist, a KeyError is raised.
To delete a key that is guaranteed to exist, you can also use
del my_dict['key'] This will raise a KeyError if the key is not in the dictionary.
Specifically to answer "is there a one line way of doing this?"
if 'key' in my_dict: del my_dict['key'] ...well, you asked ;-)
You should consider, though, that this way of deleting an object from a dict is not atomic—it is possible that 'key' may be in my_dict during the if statement, but may be deleted before del is executed, in which case del will fail with a KeyError. Given this, it would be safest to either use dict.pop or something along the lines of
try: del my_dict['key'] except KeyError: pass which, of course, is definitely not a one-liner.