Question

What is the Pythonic way to do this?

value = (mydict.has_key('index') and mydict['index']) or 1024

Initialize from a dict’s value, if present, otherwise use default value.

Got some answers on LBYL and EAFP, but too verbose code :p

I want some one-line-initialize.

PS: python-2.4 only (running CentOS5)

Answer 1

value = mydict.get('index', 1024)

(Note that this is not exactly equivalent to your code, since it will use 1024 only if the key index is not present, while your code also uses 1024 when the value corresponding to key index is falsy. From your explanation I infer the former is what you actually want.)