How to write an empty indentation block in Python?

Question

The runtime keeps telling me:

expected an indented block

But I don't want write nothing inside my except block, I just want it to catch and swallow the exception.

Answer 1

Just write

pass

as in

try:
    # Do something illegal.
    ...
except:
    # Pretend nothing happened.
    pass

EDIT: @swillden brings up a good point, viz., this is a terrible idea in general. You should, at the least, say

except TypeError, DivideByZeroError:

or whatever kinds of errors you want to handle. Otherwise you can mask bigger problems.

Answer 2

I've never done this in more permanent code, but I frequently do it as a placeholder

if some_expression:
  True
else:
  do_something(blah)

Just sticking a True in there will stop the error. Not sure if there's anything bad about this.