2.7. Reading, Counting, and Sorting Documents in a Collection

In many situations, you only want to retrieve a single document from a collection. This is especially true when documents in your collection are unique on some property. A good example of this is a users collection, where each username is guaranteed unique.

# Assuming we already have a database handle in scope named dbh
# find a single document with the username "janedoe".
user_doc = dbh.users.find_one({"username" : "janedoe"})
if not user_doc:
    print "no document found for username janedoe"