I am reading a million plus files to scrape out some data. The files are generally pretty uniform but there are occasional problems where something that I expected to find is not present.
For example, I expect some sgml code to identify a value I need
for data_line in temp #temp is a list of lines from a file
if <VARIABLENAME> in data_line:
VARIABLE_VAL=data_line.split('>')[-1]
Later on I use VARIABLE_VAL
.
But I sometimes get an exception: no line in the file that has
<VARIABLENAME>theName
To handle this I have added this line after all the lines have been processed:
try:
if VARIABLE_VAL:
pass
except NameError:
VARIABLE_VAL=somethingELSE
I have seen somewhere (but I can't find it anymore) a solution that looks like
if not VARIABLE_VAL:
VARIABLE_VAL=somethingELSE
Any help would be appreciated