How to catch exception output from Python subprocess.check_output()?

Question

I\'m trying to do a Bitcoin payment from within Python. In bash I would normally do this:

bitcoin sendtoaddress  
         


        

Answer 1

I don't think the accepted solution handles the case where the error text is reported on stderr. From my testing the exception's output attribute did not contain the results from stderr and the docs warn against using stderr=PIPE in check_output(). Instead, I would suggest one small improvement to J.F Sebastian's solution by adding stderr support. We are, after all, trying to handle errors and stderr is where they are often reported.

from subprocess import Popen, PIPE

p = Popen(['bitcoin', 'sendtoaddress', ..], stdout=PIPE, stderr=PIPE)
output, error = p.communicate()
if p.returncode != 0: 
   print("bitcoin failed %d %s %s" % (p.returncode, output, error))