On Thu, Jun 3, 2010 at 11:31 PM, Payal <payal-pyt...@scriptkitchen.com> wrote: > Hi all, > I am trying to learn exceptions and have few small doubts from > http://docs.python.org/tutorial/errors.html > There are many statements there of the form, > > ... except Exception as inst: > do something > > ... except ZeroDivisionError as detail: > do something > > ... except MyError as e: > do something > > My questions are, > what are these "inst", "detail", "e" etc. Are they special words?
No, just arbitrary variable names. > what does the word "as" do? If there's an exception of the specified type, the instanciated exception object will be bound to the specified variable before the body of the `except` statement executes. "as" is used when you want to inspect/manipulate the exception that was thrown. For example: >>> x = [] >>> x[1] Traceback (most recent call last): File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module> IndexError: list index out of range >>> >>> try: ... x[1] ... except IndexError as e: ... print "Got error:", e.args[0] # grab the error message ... Got error: list index out of range If you don't care about the actual exception object, you can of course omit the "as" part of the except clause. Cheers, Chris -- http://blog.rebertia.com -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
