How can I obtain the exception object on a generlized except statement?

[Chris Allen]

I am confused on one aspect of exception handling. If you specify the
exception object type to match in an except statement it is possible
to also obtain the exception object itself, but I can't figure out how
to get the exception object when I don't specify a match.

for example:

this works and I can do what I like with the exception object (msg).
but I can't do this with a simple except statment.

this won't work because it will think msg is the type to match

syntax error

syntax error

Hmm I didn't try that one before I started this post. It doesn't give
me a syntax error. I'll experiment.
Even if the above syntax works, is this the way to do this? It seems
sort of funky.

How do I do this? Thanks.

 

[Diez B. Roggisch]

I am confused on one aspect of exception handling. If you specify the
exception object type to match in an except statement it is possible
to also obtain the exception object itself, but I can't figure out how
to get the exception object when I don't specify a match.

for example:


this works and I can do what I like with the exception object (msg).
but I can't do this with a simple except statment.


this won't work because it will think msg is the type to match


syntax error


syntax error


Hmm I didn't try that one before I started this post. It doesn't give
me a syntax error. I'll experiment.
Even if the above syntax works, is this the way to do this? It seems
sort of funky.

How do I do this? Thanks.

pydoc sys.exc_info


Diez

 

[John Machin]

Chris Allen schrieb:











pydoc sys.exc_info

In particular, you want sys.exc_info()[:2]

 

[Chris Allen]

Just what I was looking for thanks Diez and John.

 

[Duncan Booth]

I am confused on one aspect of exception handling. If you specify the
exception object type to match in an except statement it is possible
to also obtain the exception object itself, but I can't figure out how
to get the exception object when I don't specify a match.

In most cases you can just catch Exception. If you want to be sure to
catch deprecated string exceptions also then use sys.exc_info().

try:
... something ...
except Exception, e:
print e

Also what you want to do with it when you've caught it makes a
difference:

If you are planning on logging a stack backtrace then you'll want the
traceback as well as the exception, so sys.exc_info() might be indicated
except that in that case you'll be better off using logging.exception()
instead.

try:
... something ...
except:
logging.exception("Unexpected error")

If you are just planning on swallowing the exception then you don't want
any of these: you want to catch the specific exceptions that you expect
to be raised.

Using an empty tuple for the exception specification won't catch any
exceptions. Not very useful if the tuple is a literal, but it could be
useful in some obscure situations (e.g. an except clause to handle
exceptions declared in a specific DLL which might not always be
present).