What's a more Pythonic way of grabbing N items from a dictionary?

In Python, suppose I want to grab N arbitrary items from a dictionary—say, to print them, to inspect a few items. I don’t care which items I get. I don’t want to turn the dictionary into a list (as does some code I have seen); that seems like a waste. I can do it with the following code (where N = 5), but it seems like there has to be a more Pythonic way:

count = 0
for item in my_dict.items():
    if count >= 5:
        break
    print(item)
    count += 1

Thanks in advance!

>Solution :

You can use itertools.islice to slice any iterable (not only lists):

>>> import itertools
>>> my_dict = {i: i for i in range(10)}
>>> list(itertools.islice(my_dict.items(), 5))
[(0, 0), (1, 1), (2, 2), (3, 3), (4, 4)]