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Sourcery Sourcery

Do Not Use Bare Except

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Sourcery suggestion id: do-not-use-bare-except

Section titled “Sourcery suggestion id: do-not-use-bare-except”

Description

Section titled “Description”

Use except: Exception rather than bare except

Before

Section titled “Before”
try:
    some_important_code()
except:
    exception_handling_code()

After

Section titled “After”
try:
    some_important_code()
except Exception:
    exception_handling_code()

Explanation

Section titled “Explanation”

PEP 8 recommends that we should avoid catching exceptions using a bare except clause.

The problem with these is that they catch SystemExit and KeyboardInterrupt exceptions, which makes it harder to interrupt a program using CTRL+C, and can also disguise other problems.

The PEP recommends catching Exception, which will catch all program errors, so that is what Sourcery suggests. Note that this suggestion does not trigger if the exception handler ends by raising the original exception.