This question already has an answer here:
-
Manually raising (throwing) an exception in Python
6 answers
I have read the official definition of "raise", but I still don't quite understand what it does.
In simplest terms, what is "raise"?
Example usage would help.
It has 2 purposes.
yentup has given the first one.
It's used for raising your own errors.
if something:
raise Exception('My error!')
The second is to reraise the current exception in an exception handler, so that it can be handled further up the call stack.
try:
generate_exception()
except SomeException as e:
if not can_handle(e):
raise
handle_exception(e)
It's used for raising errors.
if something:
raise Exception('My error!')
Some examples here
raise
without any arguments is a special use of python syntax. It means get the exception and re-raise it. If this usage it could have been called reraise
.
raise
From The Python Language Reference:
If no expressions are present, raise re-raises the last exception that
was active in the current scope.
If raise
is used alone without any argument is strictly used for reraise-ing. If done in the situation that is not at a reraise of another exception, the following error is shown:
RuntimeError: No active exception to reraise
You can use it to raise errors as part of error-checking:
if (a < b):
raise ValueError()
Or handle some errors, and then pass them on as part of error-handling:
try:
f = open('file.txt', 'r')
except IOError:
# do some processing here
# and then pass the error on
raise
raise
causes an exception to be raised. Some other languages use the verb 'throw' instead.
It's intended to signal an error situation; it flags that the situation is exceptional to the normal flow.
Raised exceptions can be caught again by code 'upstream' (a surrounding block, or a function earlier on the stack) to handle it, using a try
, except
combination.
Besides raise Exception("message")
and raise
Python 3 introduced a new form, raise Exception("message") from e
. It's called exception chaining, it allows you to preserve the original exception (the root cause) with its traceback.
It's very similar to inner exceptions from C#.
More info:
https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-3134/