Elegant way to unpack limited dict values into local variables in Python

Question

I'm looking for an elegant way to extract some values from a Python dict into local values.

Something equivalent to this, but cleaner for a longer list of values, and for longer key/variable names:

d = { 'foo': 1, 'bar': 2, 'extra': 3 }
foo, bar = d['foo'], d['bar']

I was originally hoping for something like the following:

foo, bar = d.get_tuple('foo', 'bar')

I can easily write a function which isn't bad:

def get_selected_values(d, *args):
    return [d[arg] for arg in args]

foo, bar = get_selected_values(d, 'foo', 'bar')

But I keep having the sneaking suspicion that there is some other builtin way.

Answer 1

You can do something like

foo, bar = map(d.get, ('foo', 'bar'))

or

foo, bar = itemgetter('foo', 'bar')(d)

This may save some typing, but essentially is the same as what you are doing (which is a good thing).