is there a pythonic way to try something up to a maximum number of times? [duplicate]

Question

I have a python script which is querying a MySQL server on a shared linux host. For some reason, queries to MySQL often return a "server has gone away" error:

_mysql_exceptions.OperationalError: (2006, 'MySQL server has gone away') 

If you try the query again immediately afterwards, it usually succeeds. So, I'd like to know if there's a sensible way in python to try to execute a query, and if it fails, to try again, up to a fixed number of tries. Probably I'd want it to try 5 times before giving up altogether.

Here's the kind of code I have:

conn = MySQLdb.connect(host, user, password, database) cursor = conn.cursor()  try:     cursor.execute(query)     rows = cursor.fetchall()     for row in rows:         # do something with the data except MySQLdb.Error, e:     print "MySQL Error %d: %s" % (e.args[0], e.args[1]) 

Clearly I could do it by having another attempt in the except clause, but that's incredibly ugly, and I have a feeling there must be a decent way to achieve this.

Answer 1

How about:

conn = MySQLdb.connect(host, user, password, database) cursor = conn.cursor() attempts = 0  while attempts < 3:     try:         cursor.execute(query)         rows = cursor.fetchall()         for row in rows:             # do something with the data         break     except MySQLdb.Error, e:         attempts += 1         print "MySQL Error %d: %s" % (e.args[0], e.args[1])