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I think this is pretty standard.  At least, I see it in ExtLib and I do it on 
a regular basis.  In fact I have a function to do this for me so I don't have 
to do it over and over again.  Eg.

  let get_one ht = mkGetOne Hashtbl.iter ht

Peng

On Tuesday 05 August 2008 08:05:46 am Brighten Godfrey wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Suppose you are given a data structure, and you want to retrive one
> element -- any one element.  Sounds simple... and it is, if you have
> a list (List.hd list) or an array (arr.(0)).  But how about a
> hashtable, if we don't know a priori any of the keys in the hashtable?
>
> The best way I've thought of so far is to begin iterating through all
> the hashtable's elements, but then break out with an exception:
>
> exception Done
> let get_one ht =
>      let el = ref None in
>      (try (
>          Hashtbl.iter (fun i _ ->
>              el := Some i;
>              raise Done)
>              ht;
>          )
>      with Done -> ());
>      match !el with
>          None -> raise Not_found
>
>          | Some x -> x
>
> But this seems clumsy.  Any better ideas?
>
> Thanks,
> Brighten Godfrey
>
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