With that said, we still have the problem of what to do with our empty except block. The solution arrives in the form of the pass keyword, which is a special statement that does precisely nothing! It's a no-op, and it's only purpose is to allow us to construct syntactically permissible blocks that are semantically empty:

def convert(s):
    """Convert a string to an integer."""
    x = -1
    try:
        x = int(s)
    except (ValueError, TypeError):
        pass
    return x

In this case though, it would be better to simplify further by using multiple return statements, doing away with the x variable completely:

def convert(s):
    """Convert a string to an integer."""
    try:
        return int(s)
    except (ValueError, TypeError):
        return -1