Question

This is a general, best-practice question. Which of the following try-except examples is better (the function itself is a simple wrapper for requests.get()):

def get(self, url, params=params):
    try:
        response = {}
        response = requests.get(url, params=params)
    except requests.ConnectionError,e:
        log.exception(e)
    finally:
        return response

or

def get(self, url, params=params):
    try:
        return requests.get(url, params=params)
    except requests.ConnectionError,e:
        log.exception(e)
        return {}

Or perhaps both are suboptimal? I seem to write these kind of wrapper functions fairly often for error logging and would like to know the most Pythonic way of doing this. Any advice on this would be appreciated.

Answer 1

It is better to return nothing on exception, and I’m agree with Mark – there is no need to return anything on exception.

def get(self, url, params=params):
    try:
        return requests.get(url, params=params)
    except requests.ConnectionError,e:
        log.exception(e)

res = get(...)
if res is not None:
    #Proccess with data

#or
if res is None:
    #aborting