On: Python idiom for taking the single item from a list

[teilo]

That sounds logical enough, except for two things:

First: You are often working with someone-else's library which for various reasons you cannot change.

Second: It is not uncommon to use a standard method that may well be able to return multiple items, but in your use case it should only return one. Case in point: a database call that returns the result of a query.

[tshaddox → teilo]

Django's ORM, the only Python one I've experience with, provides get() for those cases.