Get exception description and stack trace which caused an exception, all as a string

Question

I've seen a lot of posts about stack trace and exceptions in Python. But haven't found what I need.

I have a chunk of Python 2.7 code that may raise an exception. I would like to catch it and assign to a string its full description and the stack trace that caused the error (simply all we use to see on the console). I need this string to print it to a text box in the GUI.

Something like this:

try:
    method_that_can_raise_an_exception(params)
except Exception as e:
    print_to_textbox(complete_exception_description(e))

The problem is: what is the function complete_exception_description?

Answer 1

See the traceback module, specifically the format_exc() function. Here.

import traceback

try:
    raise ValueError
except ValueError:
    tb = traceback.format_exc()
else:
    tb = "No error"
finally:
    print tb