Python NOOP replacement [duplicate]

Question

Often I need to temporary comment some code, but there are situations like the following where commenting a single line of code will get a syntax error

if state == False:
    print "Here I'm not good do stuff"
else:
#    print "I am good here but stuff might be needed to implement"

Is there something that might act as an NOOP to keep this syntax correct?

Answer 1

The operation you're looking for is pass. So in your example it would look like this:

if state == False:
    print "Here I'm not good do stuff"
else:
    pass
#    print "I am good here but stuff might be needed to implement"

You can read more about it here: http://docs.python.org/py3k/reference/simple_stmts.html#pass

Answer 2

In Python 3, ... makes a pretty good pass substitute:

class X:
    ...

def x():
    ...

if x:
    ...

I read it as "to be done", whereas pass means "this page intentionally left blank".

It's actually just a literal, much like None, True and False, but they optimize out all the same.