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copied!<p>The OP's solution is nearly there, there are just a few things to make it more Pythonic.</p> <p>For one, there's no need to get the length of the list. Empty lists in Python evaluate to False in an if check. Just simply say</p> <pre><code>if list: </code></pre> <p>Additionally, it's a very Bad Idea to assign to variables that overlap with reserved words. "list" is a reserved word in Python.</p> <p>So let's change that to</p> <pre><code>some_list = get_list() if some_list: </code></pre> <p>A really important point that a lot of solutions here miss is that <strong>all Python functions/methods return None by default</strong>. Try the following below.</p> <pre><code>def does_nothing(): pass foo = does_nothing() print foo </code></pre> <p>Unless you need to return None to terminate a function early, it's unnecessary to explicitly return None. Quite succinctly, just return the first entry, should it exist.</p> <pre><code>some_list = get_list() if some_list: return list[0] </code></pre> <p>And finally, perhaps this was implied, but just to be explicit (because <a href="http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0020/" rel="noreferrer">explicit is better than implicit</a>), you should not have your function get the list from another function; just pass it in as a parameter. So, the final result would be</p> <pre><code>def get_first_item(some_list): if some_list: return list[0] my_list = get_list() first_item = get_first_item(my_list) </code></pre> <p>As I said, the OP was nearly there, and just a few touches give it the Python flavor you're looking for.</p>

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