Peter Hansen: >Good code should probably have a very small set of real exception >handling cases, and one or two catchalls at a higher level to avoid >barfing a traceback at the user.
Good point. >> A catchall seems like a bad idea, since it also catches AttributeErrors >> and other bugs in the program. > >Generally speaking this won't be a problem if you have your catchalls at >a fairly high level and have proper unit tests for the lower level code >which is getting called. You are doing unit testing, aren't you? ;-) With low coverage, yes. But unit testing isn't the answer for this particular problem. For example, yesterday my app was surprised by an httplib.InvalidURL since I hadn't noticed this could be raised by robotparser (this is undocumented). If that fact goes unnoticed when writing the exception handling, it will also go unnoticed when designing test cases. I probably wouldn't have thought of writing a test case with a first url with some external domain (that triggers robots.txt-fetching) that's deemed invalid by httplib. -- René Pijlman -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
