Note that what is happening is not related to any kind of implicit string conversion etc, but because the Exception
class implements ___getitem__
to return the values from the args tuple (ex.args
). You can see this by the fact that you get the whole string as your first and only item in the iteration, rather than the character-by-character result you'd get if you iterate over the string.
This surprised me too, but thinking about it, I'm guessing it is for backwards compatibility reasons. Python used to (pre-1.5) lack the current class hierarchy of exceptions. Instead, strings were thrown, with (usually) a tuple argument for any details that should be passed to the handling block, i.e:
try:
raise "something failed", (42, "some other details")
except "something failed", args:
errCode, msg = args
print "something failed. error code %d: %s" % (errCode, msg)
It looks like this behavior was put in to avoid breaking pre-1.5 code expecting a tuple of arguments, rather than a non-iterable exception object. There are a couple of examples of this with IOError
in the Fatal Breakage section of the above link
String exceptions have been deprecated for a while, and are gone in Python 3. Exception objects are no longer iterable in Python 3:
>>> list(Exception("test"))
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
TypeError: 'Exception' object is not iterable
与恶龙缠斗过久,自身亦成为恶龙;凝视深渊过久,深渊将回以凝视…