Simple way of handling errors

[Matt Nordhoff]

Steven D'Aprano wrote:
> On Wed, 06 May 2009 20:21:38 -0700, TomF wrote:
> 
>>> The only reason you would bother going to the time and effort of
>>> catching the error, printing your own error message, and then exiting,
>>> is if you explicitly want to hide the traceback from the user.
>> Well, to me, exposing the user to such raw backtraces is unprofessional,
>> which is why I try to catch user-caused errors.  But I suppose I have an
>> answer to my question.
> 
> That depends on your audience. Not every program is written to be used 
> for a technical incompetent audience. Some users actually *want* to see 
> the errors.
> 
> But certainly there are large classes of applications where you do want 
> to suppress the traceback. That's why I said "if you explicitly want to 
> hide the traceback from the user" rather than "don't do this".
> 
> The idiom I use is to wrap the *entire* application in a single 
> try...except block, and then put all your user-friendly error handling in 
> one place, instead of scattered over the entire application:
> 
> 
> try:
>     main(sys.argv[1:])
> except KeyboardInterrupt, SystemExit:

That should be:

except (KeyboardInterrupt, SystemExit):

;-D

>     raise
> except Exception, e:
>     log(e)
>     print >>sys.stderr, str(e)
>     sys.exit(1)
> 
> 
> 
> Hope this helps.
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