[wingide-users] A few observations on 2.0 rc1

[Chuck Esterbrook]

On Mon, 18 Oct 2004 07:51:39 +0200, F. GEIGER wrote:
> Now I know that I have to catch a ValueError in my program.
>
>
> The same happens with uncaught exceptions. I cannot see their class
> in the Exception Window.
>
> Any thoughts?

The WingIDE guys probably just forgot to include it. Python is very strange in that if you convert an exception to a string, it doesn't tell you what exception type was thrown! So, for example, this is not sufficient:

try:
	foo()
except Exception, e:
	print 'Caught exception: %s' % e

Instead, it needs to be:
	print 'Caught exception: %s: %s' % (e.__class__.__name__, e)

Feels like an oversight in the design of exceptions in my opinion, but it's the way that it is. I even have a function for it:

def excstr(e):
	"""
	Return a readable string for an exception. Format is:
		Class: message

	As in:
		KeyError: quoteSymbol
		AssertionError: quote={}
	"""
	if not e:
		return None
	else:
		return '%s: %s' % (e.__class__.__name__, e)


-Chuck