Pythonic way to access arbitrary element from dictionary
<p>I have a dictionary, full of items. I want to peek at a single, arbitrary item:</p>

<pre><code>print "Amongst our dictionary's items are such diverse elements as: %s" % arb(dictionary)
</code></pre>

<p>I don't care which item. It doesn't need to be <em>random</em>.</p>

<p>I can think of many ways of implementing this, but they all seem wasteful. I am wondering if any are preferred idioms in Python, or (even better) if I am missing one.</p>

<pre><code>def arb(dictionary):
# Creates an entire list in memory. Could take a while.
    return list(dictionary.values())[0]

def arb(dictionary):
# Creates an entire interator. An improvement.
    for item in dictionary.itervalues():
        return item

def arb(dictionary):
# No iterator, but writes to the dictionary! Twice!
    key, value = dictionary.popitem()
    dictionary[key] = value
    return value
</code></pre>

<p>I'm in a position where the performance isn't critical enough that this matters (yet), so I can be accused of premature optimization, but I am trying to improve my Python coding style, so if there is an easily understood variant, it would be good to adopt it.</p>
