Quicker way than “try” and “except” ? - Python

Question

I\'m often having code written as follows

try:
  self.title = item.title().content.string
except AttributeError, e:
  self.title = None

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Answer 1

• You should know ahead of time whether or not an object has a given attribute. It is a bad sign when you have an object but do not know what it is.

• You retrieve three attributes in your try block. A try block should contain as little code as possible. You could let an error pass silently if a different attribute is missing than you think.

• getattr lets you have a default value, but typically should not be used for this purpose.