Getting the exception value in Python

Question

If I have that code:

try:
    some_method()
except Exception, e:

How can I get this Exception value (string representation I mean)?

Answer 1

Another way hasn't been given yet:

try:
    1/0
except Exception, e:
    print e.message

Output:

integer division or modulo by zero

args[0] might actually not be a message.

str(e) might return the string with surrounding quotes and possibly with the leading u if unicode:

'integer division or modulo by zero'

repr(e) gives the full exception representation which is not probably what you want:

"ZeroDivisionError('integer division or modulo by zero',)"

edit

My bad !!! It seems that BaseException.message has been deprecated from 2.6, finally, it definitely seems that there is still not a standardized way to display exception messages. So I guess the best is to do deal with e.args and str(e) depending on your needs (and possibly e.message if the lib you are using is relying on that mechanism).

For instance, with pygraphviz, e.message is the only way to display correctly the exception, using str(e) will surround the message with u''.

But with MySQLdb, the proper way to retrieve the message is e.args[1]: e.message is empty, and str(e) will display '(ERR_CODE, "ERR_MSG")'