[CentralOH] Changing Exception Raised

[Mark Erbaugh]

I am developing some utility routines for parsing user input data. I would like all my routines to raise the same exception, i.e. ValueError, if the input data is invalid. In some cases, I can use routines already in the standard Python library. For example, decimal.Decimal() will take a string as input, so this is satisfactory to parse my input; however, decimal.Decimal() raises decimal.InvalidOperation if the string cannot be parsed.  I could write code to catch the InvalidOperation exception and raise a ValueError, but I wonder if there is a better/more elegant way?

Mark

import decimal

def str_to_decimal(x):
    """
    convert <str> do Decimal
    
    x - <str> input
    returns Decimal
    raises ValueError if x is not valid format for Decimal
    """
    try:
        return decimal.Decimal(x)
    except decimal.InvalidOperation:
        raise ValueError

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