Clean Code in Python

EAFP/LBYL

EAFP (stands for Easier to Ask Forgiveness than Permission), while LBYL (stands for Look Before You Leap).

The idea of EAFP is that we write our code so that it performs an action directly, and then we take care of the consequences later in case it doesn't work. Typically, this means try running some code, expecting it to work, but catching an exception if it doesn't, and then handling the corrective code on the except block.

This is the opposite of LBYL. As its name says, in the look before you leap approach, we first check what we are about to use. For example, we might want to check if a file is available before trying to operate with it:

if os.path.exists(filename):    with open(filename) as f:        ...

This might be good for ...