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

Just to note: there are times when you DO want to handle generic exceptions. If you're processing a bunch of files and logging your errors, you might want to catch any error that occurs for a file, log it, and continue processing the rest of the files. In that case, a

try:
    foo() 
except Exception as e:
    print(str(e)) # Print out handled error

block is a good way to do it. You'll still want to raise specific exceptions so you know what they mean, though.