[Python-ideas] Re: Access (ordered) dict by index; insert slice

On Sat, Aug 1, 2020 at 1:43 PM Steven D'Aprano <steve@pearwood.info> wrote:

Some years ago, someone (I think it was Nick Coghlan?) proposed a standard solution for this issue, a context manager + decorator function that guarded against a specific exception. Nothing much came of it, but I did experiment with the idea, and got something which you could use like this:

with exception_guard(StopIteration): first = next(iter(mydict.items()))

My understanding of this is that 'first' is unassigned if StopIteration happens.

or like this:

safenext = exception_guard(StopIteration)(next) first = safenext(iter(mydict.items()))

My understanding of this is that I am confused. What does safenext return? ChrisA