I’d like to add another perspective. If you’re working with both regular dictionaries and OrderedDicts, and you want an alternative to pop, try dictionary comprehension. It creates a new dictionary and renames the key in one go:
my_dict = {'old_key': 'value'}
my_dict = {('new_key' if key == 'old_key' else key): value for key, value in my_dict.items()}
print(my_dict)
# Output: {'new_key': 'value'}
This is particularly useful when you want to handle the renaming without modifying the dictionary in place. It’s a slightly different flavor of efficiently achieving Python rename dictionary key while being more functional in style.