{ 2007 09 12 }

Re-raising Exceptions

After reading Chris McDonough’s What Not To Do When Writing Python Software, it occurred to me that many people don’t actually know how to properly re-raise exceptions. So a little mini-tutorial for Python programmers, about exceptions…

First, this is bad:


try:
    some_code()
except:
    revert_stuff()
    raise Exception("some_code failed!")
 

It is bad because all the information about how some_code() failed is lost. The traceback, the error message itself. Maybe it was an expected error, maybe it wasn’t.

Here’s a modest improvement (but still not very good):


try:
    some_code()
except:
    import traceback
    traceback.print_exc()
    revert_stuff()
    raise Exception("some_code failed!")
 

traceback.print_exc() prints the original traceback to stderr. Sometimes that’s the best you can do, because you really want to recover from an unexpected error. But if you aren’t recovering, this is what you should do:


try:
    some_code()
except:
    revert_stuff()
    raise
 

Using raise with no arguments re-raises the last exception. Sometimes people give a blank never use “except:“ statement, but this particular form (except: + raise) is okay.

There’s another form of raise that not many people know about, but can also be handy. Like raise with no arguments, it can be used to keep the traceback:


try:
    some_code()
except:
    import sys
    exc_info = sys.exc_info()
    maybe_raise(exc_info)

def maybe_raise(exc_info):
    if for some reason this seems like it should be raised:
        raise exc_info[0], exc_info[1], exc_info[2]
 

This can be handy if you need to handle the exception in some different part of the code from where the exception happened. But usually it’s not that handy; it’s an obscure feature for a reason.

Another case when people often clobber the traceback is when they want to add information to it, e.g.:


for lineno, line in enumerate(file):
    try:
        process_line(line)
    except Exception, exc:
        raise Exception("Error in line %s: %s" % (lineno, exc))
 

You keep the error message here, but lose the traceback. There’s a couple ways to keep that traceback. One I sometimes use is to retain the exception, but change the message:


except Exception, exc:
    args = exc.args
    if not args:
        arg0 = ''
    else:
        arg0 = args[0]
    arg0 += ' at line %s' % lineno
    exc.args = arg0 + args[1:]
    raise
 

It’s a little awkward. Technically (though it’s deprecated) you can raise anything as an exception. If you use except Exception: you won’t catch things like string exceptions or other weird types. It’s up to you to decide if you care about these cases; I generally ignore them. It’s also possible that an exception won’t have .args, or the string message for the exception won’t be derived from those arguments, or that it will be formatted in a funny way
(KeyError formats its message differently, for instance). So this isn’t foolproof. To be a bit more robust, you can get the exception like this:


except:
    exc_class, exc, tb = sys.exc_info()
 

exc_class will be a string, if someone does something like raise "not found". There’s a reason why that style is deprecated. Anyway, if you really want to mess around with things, you can then do:


new_exc = Exception("Error in line %s: %s"
                    % (lineno, exc or exc_class))
raise new_exc.__class__, new_exc, tb
 

The confusing part is that you’ve changed the exception class around, but you have at least kept the traceback intact. It can look a little odd to see raise ValueError(...) in the traceback, and Exception in the error message.

Anyway, a quick summary of proper ways to re-raise exceptions in Python. May your tracebacks prosper!

Update: Kumar notes the problem of errors in your error handler. Things get more long winded, but here’s the simplest way I know of to deal with that:


try:
    code()
except:
    exc_info = sys.exc_info()
    try:
        revert_stuff()
    except:
        # If this happens, it clobbers exc_info, which is why we had
        # to save it above
        import traceback
        print >> sys.stderr, "Error in revert_stuff():"
        traceback.print_exc()
    raise exc_info[0], exc_info[1], exc_info[2]
 

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Posted by Ian Bicking on Wednesday, September 12th, 2007, at 10:16 am, and filed under Python.

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