A failsafe decorator for a python class

Often a Python class may have lots of bound methods that may fail, but it is not really a problem. Here I present a tidy way to deal with catching the errors with a decorator.

How to deal with horridly complex dictionaries in Python

NCBI and Uniprot data is complex, so is understandably stored as byzantine data structures, which have rather consistent schema, but hard to decipher. Depending on workflow, XML files are can be stored as dictionaries or as ElementTree.Element instances. I will talk about both, here I will talk about dictionaries —elsewhere I discuss using ElementTree. These are easier to deal with in some cases, but you can spend ages trying to find the series of keys and indices required to find a given value.
Here I present a nice pair of Python methods to get a given key or value in a convoluted object of nested dictionary-like and list-like objects.