[Python-Dev] unicode Exception messages in py2.7 (original) (raw)

Cameron Simpson cs at zip.com.au
Fri Nov 15 04:28:48 CET 2013

On 15Nov2013 14:08, Steven D'Aprano <steve at pearwood.info> wrote:

On Thu, Nov 14, 2013 at 04:02:17PM -0800, Chris Barker wrote: > right -- any bugfix changes behaviour

It isn't clear that this is a bug at all. Non-ascii Unicode strings are just a special case of the more general problem of what to do if printing the exception raises. If str(exception.message) raises, suppressing the message seems like a perfectly reasonable approach to me.

Not to me. Silent failure is really nasty. In fact, doesn't the Zen speak explicitly against it?

I'm debugging a program right now with silent failures; my own code, with functions submitted to a queue for asynchronous execution, and the queue preserves the function result (or exception) for collection later; if that collection doesn't happen you get... silent failure!

I think that if an exception escapes to the outside for reporting, if the reporting raises an exception (especially an "expectable" one like unicode coding/decoding errors), the reporting should have at least a layer of "ouch, report failed, try something uglier but more conservative". At least you'd know there had been a failure.

Cheers,

Cameron Simpson <cs at zip.com.au>

Windows is really user friendly - it doesn't crash on its own, it first opens a dialog box, saying it will crash and you have to click OK :-) - Zoltan Kocsi

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