Communities

Writing
Writing
Codidact Meta
Codidact Meta
The Great Outdoors
The Great Outdoors
Photography & Video
Photography & Video
Scientific Speculation
Scientific Speculation
Cooking
Cooking
Electrical Engineering
Electrical Engineering
Judaism
Judaism
Languages & Linguistics
Languages & Linguistics
Software Development
Software Development
Mathematics
Mathematics
Christianity
Christianity
Code Golf
Code Golf
Music
Music
Physics
Physics
Linux Systems
Linux Systems
Power Users
Power Users
Tabletop RPGs
Tabletop RPGs
Community Proposals
Community Proposals
tag:snake search within a tag
answers:0 unanswered questions
user:xxxx search by author id
score:0.5 posts with 0.5+ score
"snake oil" exact phrase
votes:4 posts with 4+ votes
created:<1w created < 1 week ago
post_type:xxxx type of post
Search help
Notifications
Mark all as read See all your notifications »
Q&A

Welcome to Software Development on Codidact!

Will you help us build our independent community of developers helping developers? We're small and trying to grow. We welcome questions about all aspects of software development, from design to code to QA and more. Got questions? Got answers? Got code you'd like someone to review? Please join us.

Post History

66%
+2 −0
Q&A How can I provide additional information when raising an exception?

The raise statement in Python accepts either an Exception class or an instance of that class. When used with a class, Python will create and raise an instance by passing no arguments to the constru...

posted 3mo ago by Karl Knechtel‭

Answer
#1: Initial revision by user avatar Karl Knechtel‭ · 2024-02-02T06:21:48Z (3 months ago)
The `raise` statement in Python accepts either an Exception class or an instance of that class. When used with a class, Python will create and raise an instance by passing no arguments to the constructor.

Python exception constructors, by default, accept an arbitrary number of positional arguments and store them as the `args` attribute of the created exception:
```
>>> Exception(1, 2).args
(1, 2)
```
When the exception is raised and not caught, the traceback will format its arguments depending on how many there are. With an empty `args` tuple, nothing is shown besides the exception type name:
```none
>>> raise Exception
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
Exception
>>> raise Exception()
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
Exception
```
With a single element in `args`, its `str` representation is shown after a colon:
```none
>>> class ExampleClass:
...     def __str__(self):
...         return 'str'
...     def __repr__(self):
...         return 'repr'
... 
>>> raise Exception(ExampleClass())
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
Exception: str
```
With two or more elements in `args`, the `str` representation of the entire tuple (*which will, in turn, rely on the `repr` representation of the elements*) is shown:
```none
>>> raise Exception(ExampleClass(), ExampleClass())
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
Exception: (repr, repr)
```
When the exception *is* caught, the `except` clause can use `as` to name the exception object, and then access its `args` for further processing:
```
>>> try: # this is obviously for demonstration purposes only!
...     raise Exception(1, 2, 3, 4)
... except Exception as e:
...     print(sum(e.args))
... 
10
```