Keep a script running when one row in the file is bad

Your script processes ten thousand rows fine until one row has a missing value, and the whole run dies right there.

IntermediateRead 5 minDoing: 30 minutes6 steps

What you'll have at the end

A script that keeps processing every good row when one is bad, writes each skipped row's line number, reason and traceback to its own rejects file, and reports the final processed and skipped counts when the run ends, exiting loud if anything was skipped.

Before you start

You need

A script that already reads rows from a file one at a time and does real work with each one: the kind that right now has no error handling around that per-row work at all, so it dies the moment one row breaks it.

Not covered

Fixing or guessing at what a bad value should have been, and retrying a failed row automatically: this recipe only keeps the run alive and records exactly what to look at, not how to repair the data itself.

Leans on

6 steps

Where to go next

Profile a brand new CSV file before you trust a single row in it

if you don't yet know what kinds of bad values this file can contain, profile it first: this recipe assumes you already know roughly what bad looks like.

Checked 25 Aug 2026

Part of the Python cookbook