If I find if's and try's looking ugly for a particular use case I try to figure out how to get rid of them. For your first example I would do this, assuming va

If I find if's and try's looking ugly for a particular use case I try to figure out how to get rid of them. For your first example I would do this, assuming value is a number. value += dict_.get('key',0) Though I agree with using an if in the second example, if there isn't a better way to do the iteration to avoid looking up keys that don't exist.