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

Trying to "transfer an amount larger than my bitcoin balance" is not an unexpected error. You could use Popen.communicate() directly instead of check_output() to avoid raising an exception unnecessarily:

from subprocess import Popen, PIPE

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