[Python-ideas] Arguments to exceptions

[Jeff Walker]

Sorry Stephen (and Steven). I'll do better next time.

The way I see it there are two problems, and the second causes the first.

The first problem is that there is no direct access to the components that make up the error in some of the standard Python exceptions.

    >>> foo
    Traceback (most recent call last):
        File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
    NameError: name 'foo' is not defined

If you need access to the name, you must de-construct the error message. To get direct access to the name, it would need to be passed to the exception when raised. Why wasn't that done? That leads us to the second problem: the base exception does not handle arguments gracefully unless you only pass an error message all by itself. For example:

    >>> try:
    >>>     name = 'foo'
    >>>     raise NameError('%s: name is not defined.' % name)
    >>> except NameError as e:
    >>>     print(str(e))
    foo: name is not defined.

Here, printing the exception cast to a string produces a reasonable error message.

    >>> try:
    >>>     name = 'foo'
    >>>     raise NameError(name, '%s: name is not defined.' % name)
    >>> except NameError as e:
    >>>     print(str(e))
    ('foo', 'foo: name is not defined.')

In this case, printing the exception cast to a string does not result in a reasonable error message.

So the basic point is that the lack of reasonable behavior for str(e) when passing multiple arguments encourages encapsulating everything into an error message, which makes it difficult to do many useful things when handling the exceptions.


Steven seems to object to the fact that the proposal takes arbitrary keyword arguments. I think this is the point of the 'nym' example. But in fact that is not really the point of the proposal, it is just a minor design choice. Instead, Steven recommends creating a custom exception with explicitly declared named arguments. And I agree with him that that is the right thing to do in many cases. But sometimes you just want something quick that you can use that does not require you to define your own exception. And sometimes, even though people should define custom exceptions, they don't. For example, NameError, KeyError, IndexError, ...

-Jeff