Optimize python if statement

Question

What is a more pythonic way to write this statement?

if soup.find(title="Email"):
 profile['email'] = soup.find(title="Email").a.string

What I want to avoid is the repetition of soup.find(title="Email")

• jonrsharpe: Then extract it to a variable; this is not a Python issue, it's the same for pretty much every language going.

Answer 1

I do not know if this is more pythonic. I do this with most languages I use. On the top of my head, something like this should avoid the repetition.

soupByEmail = soup.find(title="Email")
if soupByEmail:
 profile['email'] = soupByEmail.a.string

• Alex Hall: You used two ifs and even if you didn't it wouldn't be valid. You're thinking of Ruby.
• Kirthi Samson: @AlexHall Ah yes, this only works if there is an else condition as well. profile['email'] = soupByEmail.a.string if soupByEmail else " " Will edit.

Answer 2

It's not a matter of pythonic it's more about coding style. And as an elegant alternative you use EAFP principle (Easier to ask for forgiveness than permission) and wrap your snippet with a try-except expression:

try:
 profile['email'] = soup.find(title="Email").a.string
except Exception as exp:
 # do what you want with exp

Another advantage of this approach is that you can log the issues in your exception block, for later use, or print then in stdout.

• chepner: The original code specifically distinguished between find returning a valid object with the appropriate a attribute and (presumably) None. You can do the same here by catching AttributeError, not Exception.
• Kasravnd: @chepner Maybe, but since there would be a lot of exception in that line, I can't rely on what I'm not sure about 100%, also OP doesn't explained the code completely.
• Kevin: "Optimizing" generally means the OP is asking for code that does the same thing as their code, and this does not meet that requirement.