I'm parsing an HTML file and searching for status of order in it. Sometimes, status doesn't exist, so BeautifulSoup returns NoneType, when I'm using it. To solve this problem I use if-else statement, but it doesn't work too. Python returns:

TypeError: object of type 'NoneType' has no len()

I am adding status to a dictionary, which contains other info from the order. The code below is a part, which adds new order's info to a dict.

database.append({"Title": title[0] + title.lower()[1:],"Name": name[0].upper() + name[1:],"Status": status.string[:len(status.string)-3] if status is not None else "Not listed","Price": price})

There seem to be three cases:

1. status is None
2. status is not None, but status.string is
3. both status and status.string are not None

You have to provide code that handles each case.

if status is not None and status.string is not None:st = status.string[:-3]
else:st = "Not listed"database.append({"Title": title[0] + title.lower()[1:],"Name": name[0].upper() + name[1:],"Status": st,"Price": price})

You can also stick the whole if in the dict if you prefer. You could also use exceptions:

try:st = status.string[:-3]
except (TypeError, AttributeError):st = "Not listed"