How to re-raise an exception in nested try/except blocks?

Question

I know that if I want to re-raise an exception, I simple use raise without arguments in the respective except block. But given a nested expression like

try:
    something()
except SomeError as e:
    try:
        plan_B()
    except AlsoFailsError:
        raise e  # I'd like to raise the SomeError as if plan_B()
                 # didn't raise the AlsoFailsError

how can I re-raise the SomeError without breaking the stack trace? raise alone would in this case re-raise the more recent AlsoFailsError. Or how could I refactor my code to avoid this issue?

Answer 1

As of Python 3 the traceback is stored in the exception, so a simple raise e will do the (mostly) right thing:

try:
    something()
except SomeError as e:
    try:
        plan_B()
    except AlsoFailsError:
        raise e  # or raise e from None - see below

The traceback produced will include an additional notice that SomeError occurred while handling AlsoFailsError (because of raise e being inside except AlsoFailsError). This is misleading because what actually happened is the other way around - we encountered AlsoFailsError, and handled it, while trying to recover from SomeError. To obtain a traceback that doesn't include AlsoFailsError, replace raise e with raise e from None.

In Python 2 you'd store the exception type, value, and traceback in local variables and use the three-argument form of raise:

try:
    something()
except SomeError:
    t, v, tb = sys.exc_info()
    try:
        plan_B()
    except AlsoFailsError:
        raise t, v, tb