How to store standard error in a variable

Question

Let\'s say I have a script like the following:

useless.sh

echo \"This Is Error\" 1>&2
echo \"This Is Output\" 

And I have an

Answer 1

This post helped me come up with a similar solution for my own purposes:

MESSAGE=`{ echo $ERROR_MESSAGE | format_logs.py --level=ERROR; } 2>&1`

Then as long as our MESSAGE is not an empty string, we pass it on to other stuff. This will let us know if our format_logs.py failed with some kind of python exception.