Last element in OrderedDict

Question

I have od of type OrderedDict. I want to access its most recently added (key, value) pair. od.popitem(last = True) would do it, but would

Answer 1

A little magic from timeit can help here...

from collections import OrderedDict
class MyOrderedDict1(OrderedDict):
  def last(self):
    k=next(reversed(self))
    return (k,self[k])

class MyOrderedDict2(OrderedDict):
  def last(self):
     out=self.popitem()
     self[out[0]]=out[1]
     return out

class MyOrderedDict3(OrderedDict):
  def last(self):
     k=(list(self.keys()))[-1]
     return (k,self[k])

if __name__ == "__main__":
  from timeit import Timer

  N=100

  d1=MyOrderedDict1()
  for i in range(N): d1[i]=i

  print ("d1",d1.last())

  d2=MyOrderedDict2()
  for i in range(N): d2[i]=i

  print ("d2",d2.last())

  d3=MyOrderedDict3()
  for i in range(N): d3[i]=i

  print("d3",d3.last())



  t=Timer("d1.last()",'from __main__ import d1')
  print ("OrderedDict1",t.timeit())
  t=Timer("d2.last()",'from __main__ import d2')
  print ("OrderedDict2",t.timeit())
  t=Timer("d3.last()",'from __main__ import d3')
  print ("OrderedDict3",t.timeit())

results in:

d1 (99, 99)
d2 (99, 99)
d3 (99, 99)
OrderedDict1 1.159217119216919
OrderedDict2 3.3667118549346924
OrderedDict3 24.030261993408203

(Tested on python3.2, Ubuntu Linux).

As pointed out by @SvenMarnach, the method you described is quite efficient compared to the other two ways I could cook up.