Graceful handling of first line

[Alex Martelli]

Peter Otten <__peter__ at web.de> wrote:
   ...
> Looking at it from another angle, the initial for-loop ist just a peculiar
> way to deal with an empty iterable. So the best (i. e. clear, robust and
> general) approach is probably
> 
> items = iter(...)
> try:
>     first = items.next()
> except StopIteration:
>     # deal with empty iterator, e. g.:
>     raise ValueError("need at least one item")
> else:
>     # process remaining data

I think it can't be optimal, as coded, because it's more nested than it
needs to be (and "flat is better than nested"): since the exception
handler doesn't fall through, I would omit the try statement's else
clause and outdent the "process remaining data" part.  The else clause
would be needed if the except clause could fall through, though.


Alex