Search⌘ K
AI Features
Home
Courses
Python 101: Interactively learn how to program with Python 3

How to Handle Exceptions

Explore how to handle errors in Python effectively by using try and except statements. Learn to catch specific exceptions, manage multiple errors, and ensure clean program exits with finally. This lesson helps you write more robust Python code by dealing with common runtime issues.

We'll cover the following...

Handling exceptions in Python is really easy. Let’s spend some time writing some examples that will cause exceptions. We will start with one of the most common computer science problems: division by zero.

Python 3.5
1 / 0
# Traceback (most recent call last):
#     File "<string>", line 1, in <fragment>
# ZeroDivisionError: integer division or modulo by zero

If you think back to elementary math class, you will recall that you cannot divide by zero. In Python, this operation will cause an error, as you can see in the first half of the example. To catch the error, we wrap the operation with a try/except statement.

Python 3.5
try:
    1 / 0
except ZeroDivisionError:
    print("You cannot divide by zero!")
# You cannot divide by zero!

Bare Excepts

Here’s another way to catch the error:

Python 3.5
try:
    1 / 0
except:
    print("You cannot divide by zero!")

This is not recommended! In Python, this is known ...