Configuring Python's default exception handling

Question

For an uncaught exception, Python by default prints a stack trace, the exception itself, and terminates. Is anybody aware of a way to tailor this behaviour on the program level (other than establishing my own global, catch-all exception handler), so that the stack trace is omitted? I would like to toggle in my app whether the stack trace is printed or not.

Answer 1

You are looking for sys.excepthook:

sys.excepthook(type, value, traceback)

This function prints out a given traceback and exception to sys.stderr.

When an exception is raised and uncaught, the interpreter calls sys.excepthook with three arguments, the exception class, exception instance, and a traceback object. In an interactive session this happens just before control is returned to the prompt; in a Python program this happens just before the program exits. The handling of such top-level exceptions can be customized by assigning another three-argument function to sys.excepthook.