Mark Donald wrote:
Unless something has changed in Python 3+, I believe Nick's idiom requires the generic handler code to be copied into a second except clause to achieve identical behaviour, as follows...
Guido already said this, but yes, something did change in 3.0: unlike the 2.x series, the raise statement in 3.x only accepts instances of BaseException, so having both an "except BaseException:" clause and a bare "except:" clause becomes redundant. Running 2.x code with the -3 flag to enable Py3k deprecation warnings actually points this out whenever a non-instance of BaseException is raised. 'Normal' exceptions are encouraged to inherit from Exception, with only 'terminal' exceptions (currently only SystemExit, GeneratorExit, KeyboardInterrupt) outside that heirarchy. I agree that in 2.x, this means that if you want to handle non-Exception exceptions along with well-behaved exceptions, you need to use sys.exc_info() to adapt my previous example: except: _et, e, _tb = sys.exc_info() if isinstance(e, Cheese): # handle cheese # handle all manner of stuff, including cheese Cheers, Nick. -- Nick Coghlan | ncoghlan@gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia ---------------------------------------------------------------