General decorator to wrap try except in python?

You could use a defaultdict and the context manager approach as outlined in Raymond Hettinger's PyCon 2013 presentation

from collections import defaultdict
from contextlib import contextmanager

@contextmanager
def ignored(*exceptions):
  try:
    yield
  except exceptions:
    pass 

item = defaultdict(str)

obj = dict()
with ignored(Exception):
  item['a'] = obj.get(2).get(3) 

print item['a']

obj[2] = dict()
obj[2][3] = 4

with ignored(Exception):
  item['a'] = obj.get(2).get(3) 

print item['a']

There are lots of good answers here, but I didn't see any that address the question of whether you can accomplish this via decorators.

The short answer is "no," at least not without structural changes to your code. Decorators operate at the function level, not on individual statements. Therefore, in order to use decorators, you would need to move each of the statements to be decorated into its own function.

But note that you can't just put the assignment itself inside the decorated function. You need to return the rhs expression (the value to be assigned) from the decorated function, then do the assignment outside.

To put this in terms of your example code, one might write code with the following pattern:

@return_on_failure('')
def computeA():
    item['a'] = myobject.get('key').METHOD_THAT_DOESNT_EXIST()

item["a"] = computeA()

return_on_failure could be something like:

def return_on_failure(value):
  def decorate(f):
    def applicator(*args, **kwargs):
      try:
         return f(*args,**kwargs)
      except:
         print('Error')
         return value

    return applicator

  return decorate

It's very easy to achieve using configurable decorator.

def get_decorator(errors=(Exception, ), default_value=''):

    def decorator(func):

        def new_func(*args, **kwargs):
            try:
                return func(*args, **kwargs)
            except errors, e:
                print "Got error! ", repr(e)
                return default_value

        return new_func

    return decorator

f = get_decorator((KeyError, NameError), default_value='default')
a = {}

@f
def example1(a):
    return a['b']

@f
def example2(a):
    return doesnt_exist()

print example1(a)
print example2(a)

Just pass to get_decorator tuples with error types which you want to silence and default value to return. Output will be

Got error!  KeyError('b',)
default
Got error!  NameError("global name 'doesnt_exist' is not defined",)
default

Edit: Thanks to martineau i changed default value of errors to tuples with basic Exception to prevents errors.

General decorator to wrap try except in python?

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