Try-except for flow control in reading Sqlite

Victor Hooi victorhooi at gmail.com
Sun Oct 27 23:43:07 EDT 2013


Hi,

I'd like to double-check something regarding using try-except for controlling flow.

I have a script that needs to lookup things in a SQLite database.

If the SQLite database file doesn't exist, I'd like to create an empty database, and then setup the schema.

Is it acceptable to use try-except in order to achieve this? E.g.:

    try:
        # Try to open up the SQLite file, and lookup the required entries
    except OSError:
        # Open an empty SQLite file, and create the schema


My thinking is that it is (easier to ask forgiveness than permission), but I just wanted to check if there is a better way of achieving this?

I'd also be doing the same thing for checking if a file is gzipped or not - we try to open it as a gzip, then as an ordinary text file, and if that also fails, raise a parsing error.


Cheers,
Victor



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