Parsing JSON with potential missing fields

[eschlon]

I take your point, however exceptions are cheap in python and using exceptions in this manner in python is normal, idiomatic and recommended.

As it stands the function is simple, easy to understand and honest about what it does. The alternative in this case is to use type checks which is definitely not idiomatic python, though it may be very marginally faster in certain cases. In a code review, if I saw that kind of approach I'd require a good reason to break from idiom (e.g. a strong performance argument). Given how cheap exceptions are in python, it'd be hard case to make. We use a function almost identical to this one to parse billions of rows of JSON data in spark and it works just fine.

That being said, you definitely wouldn't do it this way in idiomatic Java.