"J. David Ibanez" <jdavid@itaapy.com> wrote in message news:421B8C4B.5050003@itaapy.com... Given that the behavior of hasattr is clearly defined in Lib Manual 2.1 as equivalent to def hasattr(obj, name): try: getattr(obj, name) return True except: return False I am not sure what could be confusing about it. It is a simple getattr wrapper converting 'got something' to True and 'did not get anything' (raised an exception instead) to False. Users should know this so they don't wastefully write 'if hasattr(o,n): x = getattr(o,n)' [snip]
Today I have spent a while to hunt down a couple of bugs in my application, because "hasattr" was catching the exceptions. [snip
If you want a different behavior, you can write your own version now, without waiting for a future that may never come, that only converts AttributeError to False and that possibly collapses all others to one type of your choosing. To make sure that even this does not mask a bug, one needs to make sure that .__getattr__ methods do not pass on unintended bug-indicating AttributeErrors. Terry J. Reedy