Python - First n items from dictionary / List

Fetch first* n items from a collection using the following techniques:

From any dictionary or list or iterable

islice method from itertools can be used to extract the given number of items from any iterable.

from itertools import islice
list(islice(iterable, n))

*Order is defined by iterable.

In action

Fetch 3 item from a dictionary

record = {'name': 'mighty', 'handler': '@DM8tyProgrammer', ...}

list(islice(record, 3))

Fetch top 5 from a list of tuples

students = [("Alex", 30), ("Bob", 50"), ...]

list(islice(sorted(students, key = lambda s: s[1]), 5))

From List

If the type of collections is known to be list , then square bracket can also be convenient.

numbers = [1, 2, 4, 5]
print(numbers[:2])