How to chain attribute lookups that might return None in Python?

I'm running Python 3.9

Python 3.9.2 (tags/v3.9.2:1a79785, Feb 19 2021, 13:44:55) [MSC v.1928 64 bit (AMD64)]

and the and key word solves my problem

memo[v] = short_combo and short_combo.copy()

From what I gather this is not pythonic and you should handle the exception.
However in my solution None ambiguity exists within the function, and in this scenario I would think it to be a poor practice to handle exceptions that occur ~50% of the time.
Where I outside of the function and calling it I would handle the exception.

The most straightforward way is to wrap in a try...except block.

try:
    title = soup.head.title.string
except AttributeError:
    print "Title doesn't exist!"

There's really no reason to test at each level when removing each test would raise the same exception in the failure case. I would consider this idiomatic in Python.

You might be able to use reduce for this:

>>> class Foo(object): pass
... 
>>> a = Foo()
>>> a.foo = Foo()
>>> a.foo.bar = Foo()
>>> a.foo.bar.baz = Foo()
>>> a.foo.bar.baz.qux = Foo()
>>> 
>>> reduce(lambda x,y:getattr(x,y,''),['foo','bar','baz','qux'],a)
<__main__.Foo object at 0xec2f0>
>>> reduce(lambda x,y:getattr(x,y,''),['foo','bar','baz','qux','quince'],a)
''

In python3.x, I think that reduce is moved to functools though :(

---

I suppose you could also do this with a simpler function:

def attr_getter(item,attributes)
    for a in attributes:
        try:
            item = getattr(item,a)
        except AttributeError:
            return None #or whatever on error
    return item

---

Finally, I suppose the nicest way to do this is something like:

try:
   title = foo.bar.baz.qux
except AttributeError:
   title = None