Manually raising (throwing) an exception in Python

Question

How can I raise an exception in Python so that it can later be caught via an except block?

Answer 1

DON'T DO THIS. Raising a bare Exception is absolutely not the right thing to do; see Aaron Hall's excellent answer instead.

Can't get much more pythonic than this:

raise Exception("I know python!")

See the raise statement docs for python if you'd like more info.