How do I get the error message out of a requests exception?

The documentation for requests.RequestException

requests.exceptions

This module contains the set of Requests' exceptions.
from urllib3.exceptions import HTTPError as BaseHTTPError


class RequestException(IOError):
    """There was an ambiguous exception that occurred while handling your request.
    """

    def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
        """Initialize RequestException with `request` and `response` objects."""
        response = kwargs.pop('response', None)
        self.response = response
        self.request = kwargs.pop('request', None)
        if (response is not None and not self.request and
                hasattr(response, 'request')):
            self.request = self.response.request
        super(RequestException, self).__init__(*args, **kwargs)

So a RequestException is a subclass of IOError with special treatment for arguments 'response' and 'request'. What is available there will depend on the code which creates the exception, which the documentation gives no guarantees about.

Consider this code:

import requests

try:
    raise requests.RequestException("Explosion!")
except requests.RequestException as ex:
    print(ex)
    print("")
    print(dir(ex))
    print("")
    print(ex.args)

The output is :

Explosion!

['__cause__', '__class__', '__context__', '__delattr__', '__dict__', 
'__dir__', '__doc__', '__eq__', '__format__', '__ge__', 
'__getattribute__', '__gt__', '__hash__', '__init__', 
'__init_subclass__', '__le__', '__lt__', '__module__', '__ne__', 
'__new__', '__reduce__', '__reduce_ex__', '__repr__', '__setattr__', 
'__setstate__', '__sizeof__', '__str__', '__subclasshook__', 
'__suppress_context__', '__traceback__', '__weakref__', 'args', 
'characters_written', 'errno', 'filename', 'filename2', 'request', 
'response', 'strerror', 'with_traceback']

('Explosion!',)

So I suspect that the message you are getting is one string which was constructed prior to creating the exception and thus is not available in its components.

Let's check the source git clone https://github.com/psf/requests.git

After some grepping I have not being able to find where your error message generates from. But consider this code from requests/utils.py

    try:
        if not pat.match(value):
            raise InvalidHeader("Invalid return character or leading space in header: %s" % name)
    except TypeError:
        raise InvalidHeader("Value for header {%s: %s} must be of type str or "
                            "bytes, not %s" % (name, value, type(value)))

InvalidHeader is a subclass of RequestException. And as we can see the error message is just a single string. As opposed to having name or value in different fields. So it is only reasonable to assume the same happens with your particular RequestException.

Something you should consider is printing ex.__class__, in my example it would just print <class 'requests.exceptions.RequestException'> . But you'll likely get a different value. Let's say it is an HTTPError exception. Then you could change your code to:

try:
    make_web_request()
except HTTPError as ex:
    logging.error("HTTP error")    
except RequestException as ex:
    logging.error(ex)

You could catch all subclasses of RequestException documented at the 1st link of this answer. That way you can print better message and even make your program react properly to different kinds of errors.

posted over 3 years ago

CC BY-SA 4.0

3y ago

Estela‭

599 reputation 10 8 90 22

but I don't think I can count on that working

There really doesn't seem to be a ready-to-use way to get that message (which feels like a good feature-request).

While ex.args[0].args[-1] is indeed not robust, you could make an error-processor that uses isinstance + getattr + ... to handle more cases; something like this:

def exc_to_message(exc: Exception) -> str:
    reason = getattr(exc, 'reason', None)
    if reason:
        if isinstance(reason, bytes):
            reason = reason.decode('utf-8', errors='replace')
        return reason
    if exc.args:
        arg = exc.args[0]
        if isinstance(arg, Exception) and arg is not exc:
            message = exc_to_message(arg)
            if message:
                return message
        # fallback 1
        return str(arg)
    # fallback 2
    return str(exc)

which is more a proof-of-concept than a complete solution; I think a better solution would require changes in urllib3. Just getting a clear "connection refused at {host}:{port}" right now would require regexes.

posted over 3 years ago

CC BY-SA 4.0

hoverhell‭

31 reputation 0 2 3 0