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

Answer 1

This is my generic solution:

class TryTimes(object):
    ''' A context-managed coroutine that returns True until a number of tries have been reached. '''

    def __init__(self, times):
        ''' times: Number of retries before failing. '''
        self.times = times
        self.count = 0

    def __next__(self):
        ''' A generator expression that counts up to times. '''
        while self.count < self.times:
            self.count += 1
        yield False

    def __call__(self, *args, **kwargs):
        ''' This allows "o() calls for "o = TryTimes(3)". '''
        return self.__next__().next()

    def __enter__(self):
        ''' Context manager entry, bound to t in "with TryTimes(3) as t" '''
        return self

    def __exit__(self, exc_type, exc_val, exc_tb):
        ''' Context manager exit. '''
        return False # don't suppress exception

This allows code like the following:

with TryTimes(3) as t:
    while t():
        print "Your code to try several times"

Also possible:

t = TryTimes(3)
while t():
    print "Your code to try several times"

This can be improved by handling exceptions in a more intuitive way, I hope. Open to suggestions.