string.Template.safe_substitute()

safe_substitute(mapping, **kwds)

Like substitute(), except that if placeholders are missing from mapping and kwds, instead of raising a KeyError exception, the original placeholder will appear in the resulting string intact. Also, unlike with substitute(), any other appearances of the $ will simply return $ instead of raising ValueError.

While other exceptions may still occur, this method is called “safe” because substitutions always tries to return a usable string instead of raising an exception. In another sense, safe_substitute() may be anything other than safe, since it will silently ignore malformed templates containing dangling delimiters, unmatched braces, or placeholders that are not valid Python identifiers.