Getting the first non None value from list

Question

Given a list, is there a way to get the first non-None value? And, if so, what would be the pythonic way to do so?

For example, I have:

• a = objA.addr

Answer 1

You can use next():

>>> a = [None, None, None, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
>>> next(item for item in a if item is not None)
1

If the list contains only Nones, it will throw StopIteration exception. If you want to have a default value in this case, do this:

>>> a = [None, None, None]
>>> next((item for item in a if item is not None), 'All are Nones')
All are Nones