Is there a more elegant way to handle empty values in this scraper?

Question

Now that I've figured out How do I strtotime in python? I'm wondering if there's a more elegant way to handle entries with empty dates, which return an error if I try to strptime() them.

warrant_issued = cells[4].get_text().strip()
try:
    warrant_issued_no = datetime.strptime(warrant_issued, '%m/%d/%Y')
except:
    warrant_issued_no = ''

This works, but I'm parsing four or five dates in each row and it seems both wordy and repetitive. I'm thinking I should define a function, but are there other ways I should make this more pythonic?

For brevity, I did from datetime import datetime at the outset so datetime.strptime() works. Otherwise I'd need datetime.datetime.strptime()

Answer 1

I think that defining a function and catching only exceptions that you know how to handle is precisely the way to do this.

def parse_datetime(warrant_issued):
   try:
      warrant_issued_no = datetime.strptime(warrant_issued, '%m/%d/%Y')
   except ValueError:
      warrant_issued_no = ''

warrants_issued = [ parse_datetime(cell.get_text().strip()) for cell in cells ]