Delete a dictionary item if the key exists [duplicate]

Question

Is there any other way to delete an item in a dictionary only if the given key exists, other than:

if key in mydict:     del mydict[key] 

The scenario is that I'm given a collection of keys to be removed from a given dictionary, but I am not certain if all of them exist in the dictionary. Just in case I miss a more efficient solution.

Answer 1

You can use dict.pop:

 mydict.pop("key", None) 

Note that if the second argument, i.e. None is not given, KeyError is raised if the key is not in the dictionary. Providing the second argument prevents the conditional exception.

Answer 2

There is also:

try:     del mydict[key] except KeyError:     pass 

This only does 1 lookup instead of 2. However, except clauses are expensive, so if you end up hitting the except clause frequently, this will probably be less efficient than what you already have.