How can you programmatically inspect the stack trace of an exception in Python?

python exception-handling stack-trace traceback
Nick Retallack picture Nick Retallack · Mar 1, 2010 · Viewed 11.9k times · Source

When an exception occurs in Python, can you inspect the stack? Can you determine its depth? I've looked at the traceback module, but I can't figure out how to use it.

My goal is to catch any exceptions that occur during the parsing of an eval expression, without catching exceptions thrown by any functions it may have called. Don't berate me for using eval. It wasn't my decision.

NOTE: I want to do this programmatically, not interactively.

Answer

Dmitry Kochkin picture Dmitry Kochkin · Mar 1, 2010

traceback is enough - and I suppose that documentation describes it rather well. Simplified example:

import sys
import traceback

try:
    eval('a')
except NameError:
    traceback.print_exc(file=sys.stdout)

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