What is the Pythonic way to try reading a file and if this read throws an exception fallback to read an alternate file?
This is the sample code I wrote, which uses nested try
-except
blocks. Is this pythonic:
try:
with open(file1, "r") as f:
params = json.load(f)
except IOError:
try:
with open(file2, "r") as f:
params = json.load(f)
except Exception as exc:
print("Error reading config file {}: {}".format(file2, str(exc)))
params = {}
except Exception as exc:
print("Error reading config file {}: {}".format(file1, str(exc)))
params = {}
For two files the approach is in my opinion good enough.
If you had more files to fallback I would go with a loop:
for filename in (file1, file2):
try:
with open(filename, "r") as fin:
params = json.load(f)
break
except IOError:
pass
except Exception as exc:
print("Error reading config file {}: {}".format(filename, str(exc)))
params = {}
break
else: # else is executed if the loop wasn't terminated by break
print("Couldn't open any file")
params = {}