How to get exception message in Python properly

Question

What is the best way to get exceptions\' messages from components of standard library in Python?

I noticed that in some cases you can get it via message

Answer 1

I too had the same problem. Digging into this I found that the Exception class has an args attribute, which captures the arguments that were used to create the exception. If you narrow the exceptions that except will catch to a subset, you should be able to determine how they were constructed, and thus which argument contains the message.

try:
   # do something that may raise an AuthException
except AuthException as ex:
   if ex.args[0] == "Authentication Timeout.":
      # handle timeout
   else:
      # generic handling