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How to pass whole statements as function parameters? python

I have this dict
dic = {'wow': 77, 'yy': 'gt', 'dwe': {'dwdw': {'fefe': 2006}}}
and I have this function
def get_missing_key(data, nest, default_value):
try:
return data + nest
except KeyError as err:
return default_value
and this is how I call it:
get_missing_key(dic, ['dwe']['dwdw']['fefe'], 16)
What I want is that I want the second parameter to get converted to normal python expression and do calculations with it
I want it to be like this
def get_missing_key(data, nest, default_value):
try:
return data['dwe']['dwdw']['fefe']
except KeyError as err:
return default_value
is there a way to achieve this?
But what I have clearly doesn't work, since I can't concatinate a dict with a list

You could use reduce like #kyle-parsons did, or you could manually loop:
lookup = ["dwe", "dwdw", "fefe"]
def find_missing(data, lookup, default):
found = data
for i in lookup:
try:
found = found[i]
except KeyError:
return default
return found

You should pass your keys as a list.
from functools import reduce
def get_missing_key(data, nest, default_value):
try:
reduce(dict.__getitem__, nest, data)
except KeyError:
return default_value
In general, Python eagerly evaluates expressions and there's no way to delay that short of passing in strings of code to be built up and execed, but that's really not a good idea.

Better practice than returning a bunch of Nones when function runs into an issue?

I often have functions that return multiple outputs which are structured like so:
def f(vars):
...
if something_unexpected():
return None, None
...
# normal return
return value1, value2
In this case, there might be a infrequent problem that something_unexpected detects (say, a empty dataframe when the routine expects at least one row of data), and so I want to return a value to the caller that says to ignore the output and skip over it. If this were a single return function then returning None once would seem fine, but when I'm returning multiple values it seems sloppy to return multiple copies of None just so the caller has the right number of arguments to unpack.
What are some better ways of coding up this construct? Is simply having the caller use a try-except block and the function raising an exception the way to go, or is there another example of good practice to use here?
Edit: Of course I could return the pair of outputs into a single variable, but then I'd have to call the function like
results = f(inputs)
if results is None:
continue
varname1, varname2 = results[0], results[1]
rather than the more clean-seeming
varname1, varname2 = f(inputs)
if varname1 is None:
continue

Depends on where you want to handle this behavior, but exceptions are a pretty standard way to do this. Without exceptions, you could still return None, None:
a, b = f(inputs)
if None in (a, b):
print("Got something bad!")
continue
Though, I think it might be better to raise in your function and catch it instead:
def f():
if unexpected:
raise ValueError("Got empty values")
else:
return val1, val2
try:
a, b = f()
except ValueError:
print("bad behavior in f, skipping")
continue

The best practice is to raise an exception:
if something_unexpected():
raise ValueError("Something unexpected happened")
REFERENCES:
Explicit is better than implicit.
Errors should never pass silently.
Unless explicitly silenced.
PEP 20 -- The Zen of Python

python try: except: pass; on multi line try statements

I have a block of statements in a try: except KeyError: pass block and wanted to know how I could have Python attempt to execute the code after the line that throws the exception.
For e.g
try:
print "entering try block"
print this_var_does_not_exists
print "past exception"
except:
pass
I want to try and print "past exception".
When I run the above code it only prints 'entering try block'

Python doesn't allow you to re-enter a failed block. Instead, you can make a nested try block:
try:
print "before"
try:
print d['not-exist']
except KeyError:
pass
print "after"
except OtherError:
print "OtherError"
Note that you can often avoid KeyErrors using .get:
try:
x = d['key']
except KeyError:
x = 0
is equivalent to
x = d.get('key', 0)
In general, try to make your try blocks as short as logically possible, so you have a better chance of dealing with the errors in an appropriate, localized fashion.

You can also use 'else' to a try/except block:
d={'a':1, 'b':2, 'd':4}
for k in 'abcd':
try:
print k, d[k],
except KeyError:
print '{} not there'.format(k)
else:
print 'I did it! Found {}'.format(k)
Prints:
a 1 I did it! Found a
b 2 I did it! Found b
c c not there
d 4 I did it! Found d
In general, the full try/except/else/final set go like this:
try:
potential_error()
except ExceptionType:
handle_that_error_somehow()
else: # 'else' to the except is SUCCESS
# There was no error
# handle success!
handle_success()
finally:
# success or failure -- do this
regardless_something_we_always_need_to_do()

python supports finally blocks, which will be executed even if there is an exception in the try block:
try:
print "entering try block"
print this_var_does_not_exists
except:
pass
finally:
print "past exception"

You can't do it with that structure. You'd need to move the extra print out of the try block. The way a try/except block works is that if an exception is raised it jumps to the appropriate except block. There's no way to go back. If you want to continue, you need to put your code either in the except or a finally, or after the whole block. Here's one example:
try:
print "entering try block"
print this_var_does_not_exists
finally:
print "past exception"
Also, don't form the dangerous habit of using bare except: clauses, especially with pass as their only content. You should catch the kinds of exceptions you can handle, and then handle them, not blindly silence all exceptions.

print with literal string will not raise exception. Put try-except only in the second print statement.
print "entering try block"
try:
print this_var_does_not_exists
except:
pass
print "past exception"

Simply put it after the try-except block

I can imagine a situation, when indeed it may be useful to execute many such one-line try-excepts without a need to add try-except block each time.
Let's say that you have a dictionary d and an object o. Object has three attributes: 'a', 'b' and 'c'. Dictionary d is generated using some function generate_dict() and may have the following keys: 'x', 'y' and 'z', but you cannot be sure which of them are present in a given dictionary. You want to assign value of key 'x' to attribute 'a', 'y' to attribute 'b' etc. In such case, you have to surround each assignment with try-catch, like this:
o = Object()
d = generate_dict()
try:
o.a = d['x']
except:
pass
try:
o.b = d['y']
except:
pass
etc. You may also replace try-excepts with checking if a given key exists in the dictionary, but the problem is still there. What happens, if you have dozens of key-attribute mappings? The number of lines grows quickly.
Another way to code this is to generate two tables of attribute and key names and execute the code in a loop using exec function, like this:
o = Object()
d = generate_dict()
attributeNames = ['a', 'b', 'c']
dataDictKeys = ['x', 'y', 'z']
for (attr, key) in zip(attributeNames, dataDictKeys):
try:
exec("o.{attr} = d['{key}']".format(attr = attr, key = key))
except:
pass
While this is not a good coding practice to do such things, still this somehow may solve your problem. But use it with caution.

repeating operation against multiple lists

Let us assume the following lists:
totest=[2,4,5,3,6]
l1=[6,8,7,9,4]
l2=[3,12,21,30]
l3=[2,5]
And the following function:
def evalitem(x):
...detail....
I have to execute the function against the intersection of totest against all the other lists in a sequence unless there is an exception.
There is always the following option:
test1=set(totest)&set(l1)
try:
for i in test1:
evalitem(i)
except:
return
test2=.....
But there should be a faster pythonic functional way to achieve this,with much better performance.
Do note that we go to evaluate test2 only if test1 does not raise an exception.

totest = set(totest)
for lst in l1, l2, l3:
for item in totest.intersection(lst):
evalitem(item)
If you don't know how to handle an exception (except: return doesn't count), there is no need to use try...except at all. Handle it in the code that calls the function in question.

Handing out Exceptions in Generators [duplicate]

This is a follow-up to Handle an exception thrown in a generator and discusses a more general problem.
I have a function that reads data in different formats. All formats are line- or record-oriented and for each format there's a dedicated parsing function, implemented as a generator. So the main reading function gets an input and a generator, which reads its respective format from the input and delivers records back to the main function:
def read(stream, parsefunc):
for record in parsefunc(stream):
do_stuff(record)
where parsefunc is something like:
def parsefunc(stream):
while not eof(stream):
rec = read_record(stream)
do some stuff
yield rec
The problem I'm facing is that while parsefunc can throw an exception (e.g. when reading from a stream), it has no idea how to handle it. The function responsible for handling exceptions is the main read function. Note that exceptions occur on a per-record basis, so even if one record fails, the generator should continue its work and yield records back until the whole stream is exhausted.
In the previous question I tried to put next(parsefunc) in a try block, but as turned out, this is not going to work. So I have to add try-except to the parsefunc itself and then somehow deliver exceptions to the consumer:
def parsefunc(stream):
while not eof(stream):
try:
rec = read_record()
yield rec
except Exception as e:
?????
I'm rather reluctant to do this because
it makes no sense to use try in a function that isn't intended to handle any exceptions
it's unclear to me how to pass exceptions to the consuming function
there going to be many formats and many parsefunc's, I don't want to clutter them with too much helper code.
Has anyone suggestions for a better architecture?
A note for googlers: in addition to the top answer, pay attention to senderle's and Jon's posts - very smart and insightful stuff.

You can return a tuple of record and exception in the parsefunc and let the consumer function decide what to do with the exception:
import random
def get_record(line):
num = random.randint(0, 3)
if num == 3:
raise Exception("3 means danger")
return line
def parsefunc(stream):
for line in stream:
try:
rec = get_record(line)
except Exception as e:
yield (None, e)
else:
yield (rec, None)
if __name__ == '__main__':
with open('temp.txt') as f:
for rec, e in parsefunc(f):
if e:
print "Got an exception %s" % e
else:
print "Got a record %s" % rec

Thinking deeper about what would happen in a more complex case kind of vindicates the Python choice of avoiding bubbling exceptions out of a generator.
If I got an I/O error from a stream object the odds of simply being able to recover and continue reading, without the structures local to the generator being reset in some way, would be low. I would somehow have to reconcile myself with the reading process in order to continue: skip garbage, push back partial data, reset some incomplete internal tracking structure, etc.
Only the generator has enough context to do that properly. Even if you could keep the generator context, having the outer block handle the exceptions would totally flout the Law of Demeter. All the important information that the surrounding block needs to reset and move on is in local variables of the generator function! And getting or passing that information, though possible, is disgusting.
The resulting exception would almost always be thrown after cleaning up, in which case the reader-generator will already have an internal exception block. Trying very hard to maintain this cleanliness in the brain-dead-simple case only to have it break down in almost every realistic context would be silly. So just have the try in the generator, you are going to need the body of the except block anyway, in any complex case.
It would be nice if exceptional conditions could look like exceptions, though, and not like return values. So I would add an intermediate adapter to allow for this: The generator would yield either data or exceptions and the adapter would re-raise the exception if applicable. The adapter should be called first-thing inside the for loop, so that we have the option of catching it within the loop and cleaning up to continue, or breaking out of the loop to catch it and and abandon the process. And we should put some kind of lame wrapper around the setup to indicate that tricks are afoot, and to force the adapter to get called if the function is adapting.
That way each layer is presented errors that it has the context to handle, at the expense of the adapter being a tiny bit intrusive (and perhaps also easy to forget).
So we would have:
def read(stream, parsefunc):
try:
for source in frozen(parsefunc(stream)):
try:
record = source.thaw()
do_stuff(record)
except Exception, e:
log_error(e)
if not is_recoverable(e):
raise
recover()
except Exception, e:
properly_give_up()
wrap_up()
(Where the two try blocks are optional.)
The adapter looks like:
class Frozen(object):
def __init__(self, item):
self.value = item
def thaw(self):
if isinstance(value, Exception):
raise value
return value
def frozen(generator):
for item in generator:
yield Frozen(item)
And parsefunc looks like:
def parsefunc(stream):
while not eof(stream):
try:
rec = read_record(stream)
do_some_stuff()
yield rec
except Exception, e:
properly_skip_record_or_prepare_retry()
yield e
To make it harder to forget the adapter, we could also change frozen from a function to a decorator on parsefunc.
def frozen_results(func):
def freezer(__func = func, *args, **kw):
for item in __func(*args, **kw):
yield Frozen(item)
return freezer
In which case we we would declare:
#frozen_results
def parsefunc(stream):
...
And we would obviously not bother to declare frozen, or wrap it around the call to parsefunc.

Without knowing more about the system, I think it's difficult to tell what approach will work best. However, one option that no one has suggested yet would be to use a callback. Given that only read knows how to deal with exceptions, might something like this work?
def read(stream, parsefunc):
some_closure_data = {}
def error_callback_1(e):
manipulate(some_closure_data, e)
def error_callback_2(e):
transform(some_closure_data, e)
for record in parsefunc(stream, error_callback_1):
do_stuff(record)
Then, in parsefunc:
def parsefunc(stream, error_callback):
while not eof(stream):
try:
rec = read_record()
yield rec
except Exception as e:
error_callback(e)
I used a closure over a mutable local here; you could also define a class. Note also that you can access the traceback info via sys.exc_info() inside the callback.
Another interesting approach might be to use send. This would work a little differently; basically, instead of defining a callback, read could check the result of yield, do a lot of complex logic, and send a substitute value, which the generator would then re-yield (or do something else with). This is a bit more exotic, but I thought I'd mention it in case it's useful:
>>> def parsefunc(it):
... default = None
... for x in it:
... try:
... rec = float(x)
... except ValueError as e:
... default = yield e
... yield default
... else:
... yield rec
...
>>> parsed_values = parsefunc(['4', '6', '5', '5h', '22', '7'])
>>> for x in parsed_values:
... if isinstance(x, ValueError):
... x = parsed_values.send(0.0)
... print x
...
4.0
6.0
5.0
0.0
22.0
7.0
On it's own this is a bit useless ("Why not just print the default directly from read?" you might ask), but you could do more complex things with default inside the generator, resetting values, going back a step, and so on. You could even wait to send a callback at this point based on the error you receive. But note that sys.exc_info() is cleared as soon as the generator yields, so you'll have to send everything from sys.exc_info() if you need access to the traceback.
Here's an example of how you might combine the two options:
import string
digits = set(string.digits)
def digits_only(v):
return ''.join(c for c in v if c in digits)
def parsefunc(it):
default = None
for x in it:
try:
rec = float(x)
except ValueError as e:
callback = yield e
yield float(callback(x))
else:
yield rec
parsed_values = parsefunc(['4', '6', '5', '5h', '22', '7'])
for x in parsed_values:
if isinstance(x, ValueError):
x = parsed_values.send(digits_only)
print x

An example of a possible design:
from StringIO import StringIO
import csv
blah = StringIO('this,is,1\nthis,is\n')
def parse_csv(stream):
for row in csv.reader(stream):
try:
yield int(row[2])
except (IndexError, ValueError) as e:
pass # don't yield but might need something
# All others have to go up a level - so it wasn't parsable
# So if it's an IOError you know why, but this needs to catch
# exceptions potentially, just let the major ones propogate
for record in parse_csv(blah):
print record

I like the given answer with the Frozen stuff. Based on that idea I came up with this, solving two aspects I did not yet like. The first was the patterns needed to write it down. The second was the loss of the stack trace when yielding an exception. I tried my best to solve the first by using decorators as good as possible. I tried keeping the stack trace by using sys.exc_info() instead of the exception alone.
My generator normally (i.e. without my stuff applied) would look like this:
def generator():
def f(i):
return float(i) / (3 - i)
for i in range(5):
yield f(i)
If I can transform it into using an inner function to determine the value to yield, I can apply my method:
def generator():
def f(i):
return float(i) / (3 - i)
for i in range(5):
def generate():
return f(i)
yield generate()
This doesn't yet change anything and calling it like this would raise an error with a proper stack trace:
for e in generator():
print e
Now, applying my decorators, the code would look like this:
#excepterGenerator
def generator():
def f(i):
return float(i) / (3 - i)
for i in range(5):
#excepterBlock
def generate():
return f(i)
yield generate()
Not much change optically. And you still can use it the way you used the version before:
for e in generator():
print e
And you still get a proper stack trace when calling. (Just one more frame is in there now.)
But now you also can use it like this:
it = generator()
while it:
try:
for e in it:
print e
except Exception as problem:
print 'exc', problem
This way you can handle in the consumer any exception raised in the generator without too much syntactic hassle and without losing stack traces.
The decorators are spelled out like this:
import sys
def excepterBlock(code):
def wrapper(*args, **kwargs):
try:
return (code(*args, **kwargs), None)
except Exception:
return (None, sys.exc_info())
return wrapper
class Excepter(object):
def __init__(self, generator):
self.generator = generator
self.running = True
def next(self):
try:
v, e = self.generator.next()
except StopIteration:
self.running = False
raise
if e:
raise e[0], e[1], e[2]
else:
return v
def __iter__(self):
return self
def __nonzero__(self):
return self.running
def excepterGenerator(generator):
return lambda *args, **kwargs: Excepter(generator(*args, **kwargs))

(I answered the other question linked in the OP but my answer applies to this situation as well)
I have needed to solve this problem a couple of times and came upon this question after a search for what other people have done.
One option- which will probably require refactoring things a little bit- would be to simply create an error handling generator, and throw the exception in the generator (to another error handling generator) rather than raise it.
Here is what the error handling generator function might look like:
def err_handler():
# a generator for processing errors
while True:
try:
# errors are thrown to this point in function
yield
except Exception1:
handle_exc1()
except Exception2:
handle_exc2()
except Exception3:
handle_exc3()
except Exception:
raise
An additional handler argument is provided to the parsefunc function so it has a place to put the errors:
def parsefunc(stream, handler):
# the handler argument fixes errors/problems separately
while not eof(stream):
try:
rec = read_record(stream)
do some stuff
yield rec
except Exception as e:
handler.throw(e)
handler.close()
Now just use almost the original read function, but now with an error handler:
def read(stream, parsefunc):
handler = err_handler()
for record in parsefunc(stream, handler):
do_stuff(record)
This isn't always going to be the best solution, but it's certainly an option, and relatively easy to understand.

About your point of propagating exception from generator to consuming function,
you can try to use an error code (set of error codes) to indicate the error.
Though not elegant that is one approach you can think of.
For example in the below code yielding a value like -1 where you were expecting
a set of positive integers would signal to the calling function that there was
an error.
In [1]: def f():
...: yield 1
...: try:
...: 2/0
...: except ZeroDivisionError,e:
...: yield -1
...: yield 3
...:
In [2]: g = f()
In [3]: next(g)
Out[3]: 1
In [4]: next(g)
Out[4]: -1
In [5]: next(g)
Out[5]: 3

Actually, generators are quite limited in several aspects. You found one: the raising of exceptions is not part of their API.
You could have a look at the Stackless Python stuff like greenlets or coroutines which offer a lot more flexibility; but diving into that is a bit out of scope here.