Is there a more Pythonic way to combine an Else: statement and an Except:?

Question

I have a piece of code that searches AutoCAD for text boxes that contain certain keywords (eg. "overall_weight" in this case) and replaces it with a value from a dictionary. However, sometimes the dictionary key is assigned to an empty string and sometimes, the key doesn't exist altogether. In these cases, the "overall_weight" keywords should be replaced with "N/A". I was wondering if there was a more pythonic way to combine the KeyError exception and the else to both go to nObject.TextString = "N/A" so its not typed twice.

if nObject.TextString == "overall_weight":     try:         if self.var.jobDetails["Overall Weight"]:             nObject.TextString = self.var.jobDetails["Overall Weight"]         else:             nObject.TextString = "N/A"     except KeyError:         nObject.TextString = "N/A" 

Edit: For clarification for future visitors, there are only 3 cases I need to take care of and the correct answer takes care of all 3 cases without any extra padding.

1. dict[key] exists and points to a non-empty string. TextString replaced with the value assigned to dict[key].

2. dict[key] exists and points to a empty string. TextString replaced with "N/A".

3. dict[key] doesn't exist. TextString replaced with "N/A".

Answer 1

Use dict.get() which will return the value associated with the given key if it exists otherwise None. (Note that '' and None are both falsey values.) If s is true then assign it to nObject.TextString otherwise give it a value of "N/A".

if nObject.TextString == "overall_weight":     nObject.TextString = self.var.jobDetails.get("Overall Weight") or "N/A" 

Answer 2

Use get() function for dictionaries. It will return None if the key doesn't exist or if you specify a second value, it will set that as the default. Then your syntax will look like:

nObject.TextString = self.var.jobDetails.get('Overall Weight', 'N/A')