How to Safely Remove a Key from a Python Dictionary?

How to Remove a Key from a Python Dictionary Safely

Deleting a key-value pair from a Python dictionary is a common task. The naive approach is to check if the key exists and then delete it:

if key in my_dict:
    del my_dict[key]

However, this method is prone to KeyErrors if the key does not exist.

To handle this situation more gracefully, you can use the two-argument form of the dict.pop() method:

my_dict.pop('key', None)

This code will return the value associated with key if it exists, or None otherwise. If the second parameter is omitted, a KeyError will be raised if the key does not exist.

For keys that are guaranteed to exist, you can also use:

del my_dict['key']

However, this method will also raise a KeyError if the key does not exist.

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