Python exception chaining [duplicate]

Solution 1:

Exception chaining is only available in Python 3, where you can write:

try:
    v = {}['a']
except KeyError as e:
    raise ValueError('failed') from e

which yields an output like

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "t.py", line 2, in <module>
    v = {}['a']
KeyError: 'a'

The above exception was the direct cause of the following exception:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "t.py", line 4, in <module>
    raise ValueError('failed') from e
ValueError: failed

In most cases, you don't even need the from; Python 3 will by default show all exceptions that occured during exception handling, like this:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "t.py", line 2, in <module>
    v = {}['a']
KeyError: 'a'

During handling of the above exception, another exception occurred:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "t.py", line 4, in <module>
    raise ValueError('failed')
ValueError: failed

What you can do in Python 2 is adding custom attributes to your exception class, like:

class MyError(Exception):
    def __init__(self, message, cause):
        super(MyError, self).__init__(message + u', caused by ' + repr(cause))
        self.cause = cause

try:
    v = {}['a']
except KeyError as e:
    raise MyError('failed', e)

Solution 2:

Is this what you're asking for?

class MyError(Exception):
    def __init__(self, other):
        super(MyError, self).__init__(other.message)

>>> try:
...     1/0
... except Exception, e:
...     raise MyError(e)
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<pyshell#27>", line 4, in <module>
    raise MyError(e)
MyError: division by zero

If you want to store the original exception object, you can certainly do so in your own exception class's __init__. You might actually want to store the traceback as the exception object itself doesn't provide much useful information about where the exception occurred:

class MyError(Exception):
    def __init__(self, other):
        self.traceback = sys.exc_info()
        super(MyError, self).__init__(other.message)

After this you can access the traceback attribute of your exception to get info about the original exception. (Python 3 already provides this as the __traceback__ attribute of an exception object.)