[Tutor] reading stdin?

[D-Man]

On Sat, Feb 17, 2001 at 05:20:07PM +0100, J=F6rg W=F6lke wrote:
[snip]
| > >>> try :
| > ...     data =3D int( raw_input( "Enter a number: " ) )
| > ... except ValueError , err :
| > ...     print "You didn't enter a valid number"
| > ...
|=20
| excuse me if that's a silly question:
| why not just

It's a perfectly good question.

| try:
|      data =3D input("Enter number: ")
| except:
|      "wrong"
|=20
| which would trap all errors?

This is exactly why you don't want to use a universal except clause --
do you really want to catch KeyBoardError, OutOfMemoryError,
SystemExit and ComputerExplodingError?  Using a universal except will
work if you never get one of these kind of errors, but if you do get
one, the program won't behave as expected.  It is generally good to be
as explicit as you can in what exceptions you want to catch and
handle.  I didn't do it here, but in an earlier post (see archives) I
used the exception to tell the user what exactly they entered that
wasn't a valid number.  By explicitly catching certain exceptions, you
can use their data to improve the error handling.

-D