Getting the exception value in Python

Question

If I have that code:

try:
    some_method()
except Exception, e:

How can I get this Exception value (string representation I mean)?

Answer 1

Use repr() and The difference between using repr and str

Using repr:

>>> try:
...     print(x)
... except Exception as e:
...     print(repr(e))
... 
NameError("name 'x' is not defined")

Using str:

>>> try:
...     print(x)
... except Exception as e:
...     print(str(e))
... 
name 'x' is not defined

Answer 2

Even though I realise this is an old question, I'd like to suggest using the traceback module to handle output of the exceptions.

Use traceback.print_exc() to print the current exception to standard error, just like it would be printed if it remained uncaught, or traceback.format_exc() to get the same output as a string. You can pass various arguments to either of those functions if you want to limit the output, or redirect the printing to a file-like object.

Answer 3

Another way hasn't been given yet:

try:
    1/0
except Exception, e:
    print e.message

Output:

integer division or modulo by zero

args[0] might actually not be a message.

str(e) might return the string with surrounding quotes and possibly with the leading u if unicode:

'integer division or modulo by zero'

repr(e) gives the full exception representation which is not probably what you want:

"ZeroDivisionError('integer division or modulo by zero',)"

edit

My bad !!! It seems that BaseException.message has been deprecated from 2.6, finally, it definitely seems that there is still not a standardized way to display exception messages. So I guess the best is to do deal with e.args and str(e) depending on your needs (and possibly e.message if the lib you are using is relying on that mechanism).

For instance, with pygraphviz, e.message is the only way to display correctly the exception, using str(e) will surround the message with u''.

But with MySQLdb, the proper way to retrieve the message is e.args[1]: e.message is empty, and str(e) will display '(ERR_CODE, "ERR_MSG")'

Answer 4

To inspect the error message and do something with it (with Python 3)...

try:
    some_method()
except Exception as e:
    if {value} in e.args:
        {do something}

Answer 5

For python2, It's better to use e.message to get the exception message, this will avoid possible UnicodeDecodeError. But yes e.message will be empty for some kind of exceptions like OSError, in which case we can add a exc_info=True to our logging function to not miss the error.
For python3, I think it's safe to use str(e).

Answer 6

The following worked for me:

import traceback

try:
    some_method()
except Exception as e:
   # Python 3.9 or older
   print("".join(traceback.format_exception_only(type(e), e)).strip())
   # Python 3.10+
   print("".join(traceback.format_exception_only(e)).strip())

If some_method() raises the exception ValueError("asdf"), this prints what you see in tracebacks--minus the traceback: ValueError: asdf.

Here is the documentation on this.

Answer 7

If you don't know the type/origin of the error, you can try:

import sys
try:
    doSomethingWrongHere()
except:
    print('Error: {}'.format(sys.exc_info()[0]))

But be aware, you'll get pep8 warning:

[W] PEP 8 (E722): do not use bare except