CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonexception
anekix
anekix

Reputation: 2563

how to handle exceptions while writing a library in python

Consider writing a small library in python that has this one simple method x which accepts an argument ac & returns the computed value 10/ac. now the catch here is ac cannot be 0. so how do i handle this case in my method.there are these ways that comes to my mind.

NOTE: i have looked into python exception handling but it just shows how to use try except not the specific problem that i am asking.

method 1

def x(ac):
    try:
        return (10/ac)
    except  ZeroDivisionError:
        raise ZeroDivisionError("ac cannot be zero")

The above code just uses a plain try except block to catch spcific exceptions and raises the exception to the calling code. so the calling code would look like this:

# some script...
try:
    x(0)
except ZeroDivisionError as e:
    log(e)

but in this case, i would have to know before hand what all possible exceptions that method x might raise.

Method 2:

def x(ac):
    if ac == 0:
        raise ValueError("ac cannot be zero") # or ZeroDivisionError??
    else:
        return (10/ac)

i guess this is semantically same as previous one except that to check some conditions(that we know might occur) using if's & raising exceptions based on that. It also suffers from the same problem of knowing beforehand what exceptions the method might throw.

method 3

The last method is not handling any exception in the library method rather leave it to the client code but this obviously doesn't makes sense as the client would never be able to know why exactly the error might occur while resort to something like 

def x(ac):
    return (10/ac)


    try:
       x(20)
    except Exception as e:
       log(e)

now this method here was a simple method with just one opertaion but what if the method itself is doing something complicated like connecting to the database then fetching some results. something like :

def x(db):
    conn = db.connect('localhost')
    results = connec.fetch(user_id=2)
    return results

if something is unclear please let me know.

Upvotes: 2

Views: 3539

Answers (1)

Martijn Pieters
Martijn Pieters

Reputation: 1124188

It depends. Exceptions like TypeError or ValueError are standard and usually indicate programming errors. There is usually no need to be explicit about these.

The rest, you document. As an API author it's your responsibility to make it clear what behaviour another developer can expect from your code. If ZeroDivisionError is a good signal to document, then add that to the docstring of the API. At that point there is no need to explicitly catch and raise it again either. Don't count on the users reading your code, give them good documentation instead.

For many APIs it makes sense to define your own exceptions. The implementation can catch generic exceptions, or the custom exceptions of 3rd-party APIs it uses to do the work, then raise an API-specific exception to signal to the caller something is wrong, letting them handle the issue.

There are legion examples of popular Python libraries with such exceptions. Some examples:

What these projects have in common is good documentation, that explicitly names the exceptions that anyone using the project should be aware of.

Upvotes: 7

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