About catching ANY exception

Question

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

Answer 1

There are multiple ways to do this in particular with Python 3.0 and above

Approach 1

This is simple approach but not recommended because you would not know exactly which line of code is actually throwing the exception:

def bad_method():
    try:
        sqrt = 0**-1
    except Exception as e:
        print(e)

bad_method()

Approach 2

This approach is recommended because it provides more detail about each exception. It includes:

• Line number for your code
• File name
• The actual error in more verbose way

The only drawback is tracback needs to be imported.

import traceback

def bad_method():
    try:
        sqrt = 0**-1
    except Exception:
        print(traceback.print_exc())

bad_method()

Answer 2

You can but you probably shouldn't:

try:
    do_something()
except:
    print "Caught it!"

However, this will also catch exceptions like KeyboardInterrupt and you usually don't want that, do you? Unless you re-raise the exception right away - see the following example from the docs:

try:
    f = open('myfile.txt')
    s = f.readline()
    i = int(s.strip())
except IOError as (errno, strerror):
    print "I/O error({0}): {1}".format(errno, strerror)
except ValueError:
    print "Could not convert data to an integer."
except:
    print "Unexpected error:", sys.exc_info()[0]
    raise