Generic catch for python

Question

I have some extremely weird behavior that seems to result in silent exceptions. How can I write a general try catch where I can debug all exceptions. Something along the lines of:

try:
    # something that fails
except e:
    print e

A bit more about the problem at hand in detail:

I have a Django app that on the my comp (Ubuntu Linux 8.10) works fine both through runserver and mod-python. On the deploy server (Ubunut Linux 8.10) it works fine through runserver, but fails via apache in mod-python.

I have reduced the cause down to a part off the app that uses Berkeley DB (bsddb.db), and secondary keys. The callback method for secondary keys uses pickle to format the keys. It fails when I call pickle on a single value. However, it only fails when I use cPickle, and using pickle on the same values outside the callback function also works.

I just want to know why it fails with cPickle.

Answer 1

Does this work? :

except BaseException, e:

Answer 2

The traceback module is quite useful for formatting tracebacks. You can then write it to a logfile.

Answer 3

Exceptions are already printed by default before program termination. If you want to send the error somewhere else (not print it) you can do this:

try:
    something()
except Exception as e:
    send_somewhere(traceback.format_exception(*sys.exc_info()))
    raise # reraises the exception

note that this format using the as keyword is for python > 2.6. The old way was:

except Exception, e: