On Jul 13, 8:25 pm, Steven D'Aprano <ste...@remove.this.cybersource.com.au> wrote: > On Mon, 13 Jul 2009 17:49:23 -0700, Carl Banks wrote: > > On Jul 13, 12:31 pm, Piet van Oostrum <p...@cs.uu.nl> wrote: > >> >>>>> seldan24 <selda...@gmail.com> (s) wrote: > >> >s> Hello, > >> >s> I'm fairly new at Python so hopefully this question won't be too s> > >> >awful. I am writing some code that will FTP to a host, and want to s> > >> >catch any exception that may occur, take that and print it out s> > >> >(eventually put it into a log file and perform some alerting action). > >> >s> I've figured out two different ways to do this, and am wondering > >> >which s> is the best (i.e. cleanest, 'right' way to proceed). I'm > >> >also trying s> to understand exactly what occurs for each one. s> The > >> >first example: > >> >s> from ftplib import FTP > >> >s> try: > >> >s> ftp = FTP(ftp_host) > >> >s> ftp.login(ftp_user, ftp_pass) s> except Exception, err: > >> >s> print err > > >> I think you should restrict yourself to those exceptions that are > >> related to ftp. Do you want to catch an exception like a misspelling in > >> one of the variables? > > > He quite reasonably could want that, such as if the program is designed > > to be run from a cron job, or in some other non-interactive way. > > Why is it okay for non-interactive programs to silently have incorrect > behaviour? > > What's the point of a cron job that doesn't do what it is supposed to, > because it has a bug which is silently swallowed?
Seriously, do you *ever* take more than 2 seconds to consider whether you might be missing something obvious before following up with these indignant knee-jerk responses? I never said a thing about swallowing errors. I was talking about catching exceptions, whence you might do all kinds of things besides swallowing (like logging). I was pointing out there are reasons why you might want to catch variable misspelling errors when you're running non-interactively (like for instance, to log the error somewhere). Or would you rather let all unexpected exceptions print to standard error, which is often a black hole in non-interactive sitations? Carl Banks -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
