How to except the unexpected?

[Roy Smith]

Rene Pijlman <reply.in.the.newsgroup at my.address.is.invalid> wrote:

> A catchall seems like a bad idea, since it also catches AttributeErrors
> and other bugs in the program.

All of the things like AttributeError are subclasses of StandardError.  You 
can catch those first, and then catch everything else.  In theory, all 
exceptions which represent problems with the external environment (rather 
than programming mistakes) should derive from Exception, but not from 
StandardError.  In practice, some very old code may raise things which do 
not derive from Exception, which complicates things somewhat.

--------------------------------------------------
#!/usr/bin/env python                                                                               

import socket

try:
    x = []
    y = x[42]
except StandardError, foo:
    print "Caught a StandardError: ", foo
except Exception, foo:
    print "Caught something else: ", foo

try:
    socket.socket (9999)
except StandardError, foo:
    print "Caught a StandardError: ", foo
except Exception, foo:
    print "Caught something else: ", foo

try:
    raise "I'm a string pretending to be an exception"
except StandardError, foo:
    print "Caught a StandardError: ", foo
except Exception, foo:
    print "Caught something else: ", foo
--------------------------------------------------

Roy-Smiths-Computer:play$ ./ex.py
Caught a StandardError:  list index out of range
Caught something else:  (43, 'Protocol not supported')
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "./ex.py", line 21, in ?
    raise "I'm a string pretending to be an exception"
I'm a string pretending to be an exception