What is the most Pythonic way to provide a fall-back value in an assignment?

Question

In Perl, it\'s often nice to be able to assign an object, but specify some fall-back value if the variable being assigned from is \'undef\'. For instance:

my $x         


        

Answer 1

One way to rewrite...

if x is not None
    a = x
else
    a = y

..is:

x = myfunction()

if x is None:
    x = y

print x

Or, using exceptions (possibly more Python'y, depending on the what the code is doing - if it returns None because there was an error, using an exception is probably the correct way):

try:
    x = myfunction()
except AnException:
    x = "fallback"

print x

All that said, there really isn't anything wrong with you original code:

if x is not None
    a = x
else
    a = y

It's long, but I find that far easier to read (and much more Pythonic) than either of the following one-liners:

a = x if x is not None else y
a = x or y