About catching ANY exception

python exception-handling
user469652 picture user469652 · Feb 14, 2011 · Viewed 681.4k times · Source

How can I write a try/except block that catches all exceptions?

Answer

Duncan picture Duncan · Feb 14, 2011

Apart from a bare except: clause (which as others have said you shouldn't use), you can simply catch Exception:

import traceback
import logging

try:
    whatever()
except Exception as e:
    logging.error(traceback.format_exc())
    # Logs the error appropriately.

You would normally only ever consider doing this at the outermost level of your code if for example you wanted to handle any otherwise uncaught exceptions before terminating.

The advantage of except Exception over the bare except is that there are a few exceptions that it wont catch, most obviously KeyboardInterrupt and SystemExit: if you caught and swallowed those then you could make it hard for anyone to exit your script.

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