the holy grail of Pythonic exception handling?

Hey there,

I'm surprised by it time and time again, but with programming, you truly *never* stop learning new things:

The other day PythonistaCafe member Greg posted a new discussion thread where he shared an example of the "contextlib.suppress()" function available in Python 3.4 (and above) that I thought was really cool.

Here's the gist of it—

You can use contextlib.suppress() to selectively ignore specific exceptions using a context manager and the "with" statement:
 

import contextlib

with contextlib.suppress(FileNotFoundError):
    os.remove('somefile.tmp')

This is equivalent to the following try/except clause:
 

try:
    os.remove('somefile.tmp')
except FileNotFoundError:
    pass

I think "suppress()" is a lovely little helper function—the resulting code is quite readable and clear.

Even a Python novice with just a tiny bit of experience with exceptions should be able to figure out what's going on.

And even someone who's never worked with exceptions in their code yet, they should be able to understand this code snippet because it reads (almost) like an English sentence. 

It's beautiful :-)

I've been working with Python for a while now, but somehow I managed to miss this little feature until I saw Greg's post (Thanks, Greg!)

So what are the lessons learned here? Two things:

Well, like I said, with programming you'll never truly "know it all." Expertise in our industry is a moving target, and there's will always be new things to learn and to integrate into your working life. And I think that's wonderful!

Is learning about this little "trick" going to change my life as a Pythonista? Not really. But I still very much appreciate the little endorphin spike I got from reading Greg's post.

And then, there's the immense value you get from being part of the Python community at large. Whether that's through something like this newsletter, attending meetups in your city, joining PythonistaCafe, going to PyCon, or becoming a member of a private "mastermind group"—

I *cannot* overstate how important it is to learn with and from other developers:

My programming skills, my business, and my personal life have all benefitted greatly from exchanging ideas and knowledge with others who truly cared about the same things as me.

It's impossible for me to keep up with the "information firehose" that is the Internet today. There's just too much interesting stuff happening day in and out.

I believe that the best strategy to deal with information overload is to rely on curation and a trusted group of peers you can share your journey with. It gives you a filter for the "new and shiny," and a powerful source of information you can tap into when you need it.

Happy Pythoning!

— Dan Bader