Today I learned that the module contextlib provides with a context manager to suppress specified errors.

contextlib

The module contextlib contains many utilities to deal with context managers. In particular, it contains some useful context managers.

One example of a useful context manager that contextlib possesses is suppress: the context manager suppress does exactly what it says: it suppresses errors of the specified types.

For example, the code

from contextlib import suppress

with suppress(KeyError):
    ...

prepares a context manager in which KeyErrors are ignored.

This context manager is a great replacement for the following pattern:

try:
    # ...
except SomeError:
    pass

When we want to try to do something and want do nothing in case it fails, the context manager suppress is great because it reduces the boilerplate you have to write.

Code examples

As an example, consider a function that deletes a key from a dictionary. If you try to delete a key from a dictionary that doesn't contain that key, you get an error:

>>> del {}["non-existing"]
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
KeyError: 'non-existing'

Thus, we could write our function in one of two ways:

def dictionary_key_delete(a_dict, key):
    if key in a_dict:
        del a_dict[key]

# or

def dictionary_key_delete(a_dict, key):
    try:
        del a_dict[key]
    except KeyError:
        pass

Because Python prefers a EAFP coding style, the approach with try is often preferred in Python. However, with contextlib.suppress, it becomes more concise:

from contextlib import suppress

def dictionary_key_delete(a_dict, key):
    with suppress(KeyError):
        del a_dict[key]

At the same time, this makes the code very expressive, because we know beforehand that we will ignore that specific type of error, giving a hint that we really just want to try to do something but we won't be bothered if it fails.

Another good example is for a function that removes an element from a list. The built-in type list has a method that does almost what we want, called .remove. The only issue is that the method throws a ValueError if the element is not in the list.

We can work around this in several ways:

# (LBYL) Look before you leap:
def remove_from_list(a_list, element):
    if element in a_list:
        a_list.remove(element)

# (EAFP) Easier to ask forgiveness than permission:
def remove_from_list(a_list, element):
    try:
        a_list.remove(element)
    except ValueError:
        pass

# Also EAFP but more concise:
from contextlib import suppress
def remove_from_list(a_list, element):
    with suppress(ValueError):
        a_list.remove(element)

Both these examples leverage greatly (although implicitly, because I'm not talking about it here) the debate between the EAFP and LBYL coding styles, that you can read about in this article.

Thank you, @loicteixeira, for teaching me this, while discussing the Python Problem-Solving Bootcamp.

That's it for now! Stay tuned and I'll see you around!

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