For Loop or None

Have you ever received the error: TypeError: 'NoneType' object is not iterable when trying to iterate over a variable? Well, that's because you're trying to iterate over a variable that is set to None instead of an iterable like a list.

This is a solution I found when trying to loop over a variable that could either be a list of items or the variable could be set to None. It feels a lot more pythonic than having to check if the variable is a list before looping over it. This was specifically happing when getting back data from sqlalchemy queries. The query can either return a list of items it found in the database or it can return None if nothing is found.

This is a sqlalchemy query, it will either return a list of people with the first_name of "Justin" or if there is no person with that first name it will return None. This is just an example of when a variable might be a list with list items or None.

people = Person.query.filter_by(first_name='Justin').all()		

I'm going to specifically set people to None here to show that people is actually None instead of having to look into what the above query actually returns.

people = None

If people was a list that contained items, the print statements in the for loop would be called. Since people is set to None, nothing will be printed because the empty list in the or []section is what gets evaluated.

for person in people or []: 
    print(person.first_name)

Unrelated comprehension equivalent but same concept

result = [do_something(item) for item in a_list() or []]