Description
The last except clause may omit the exception name(s), to serve as a wildcard. Use this with extreme caution, since it is easy to mask a real programming error in this way! It can also be used to print an error message and then re-raise the exception (allowing a caller to handle the exception as well):
import sys
try:
f = open('myfile.txt')
s = f.readline()
i = int(s.strip())
except IOError, (errno, strerror):
print "I/O error(%s): %s" % (errno, strerror)
except ValueError:
print "Could not convert data to an integer."
except:
print "Unexpected error:", sys.exc_info()[0]
raise
The try ... except statement has an optional else clause, which, when present, must follow all except clauses. It is useful for code that must be executed if the try clause does not raise an exception. For example:
for arg in sys.argv[1:]:
try:
f = open(arg, 'r')
except IOError:
print 'cannot open', arg
else:
print arg, 'has', len(f.readlines()), 'lines'
f.close()
The use of the else clause is better than adding additional code to the try clause because it avoids accidentally catching an exception that wasn't raised by the code being protected by the try ... except statement.