Avoiding "Too broad exception clause" warning in PyCharm

Question

I’m writing an exception clause at the top level of a script, and I just want it to log whatever errors occur. Annoyingly, PyCharm complains if I just catch Exception.

import logging

logging.basicConfig()

try:
    raise RuntimeError('Bad stuff happened.')
except Exception:  # <= causes warning: Too broad exception clause
    logging.error('Failed.', exc_info=True)

Is there something wrong with this handler? If not, how can I tell PyCharm to shut up about it?

Asked By: Don Kirkby

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Source

Answer 1

I found a hint in this closed feature request for PyCharm:

I suggest you to mark this inspection as ‘okay’ if the except block makes use of exception instance e somehow.

Because I’m logging with exc_info=True, I’m implicitly using the current exception object, but PyCharm doesn’t know that. To make it explicit, I can pass the exception object to exc_info. Since Python 3.5, the logger methods have accepted an exception instance to report, as well as accepting any truthy value to report the current exception and stack trace in the log.

import logging

logging.basicConfig()

try:
    raise RuntimeError('Bad stuff happened.')
except Exception as e:
    logging.error('Failed.', exc_info=e)

Answered By: Don Kirkby

Answer 2

From a comment by Joran: you can use # noinspection PyBroadException to tell PyCharm that you’re OK with this exception clause. This is what I was originally looking for, but I missed the option to suppress the inspection in the suggestions menu.

import logging

logging.basicConfig()

# noinspection PyBroadException
try:
    raise RuntimeError('Bad stuff happened.')
except Exception:
    logging.error('Failed.', exc_info=True)

If you don’t even want to log the exception, and you just want to suppress it without PyCharm complaining, there’s a new feature in Python 3.4: contextlib.suppress().

import contextlib

with contextlib.suppress(Exception):
    raise RuntimeError('Bad stuff happened.')

That’s equivalent to this:

try:
    raise RuntimeError('Bad stuff happened.')
except Exception:
    pass

Answered By: Don Kirkby

Answer 3

Not sure about your PyCharm version (mine is 2019.2), but I strongly recommend disabling this PyCharm inspection in File> Settings> Editor> Inspections and type “too broad”. In Python tab, deselect “too broad exceptions clauses” to avoid those. I believe this way PyCharm would show you the correct expression inspection

Answered By: Daniel Serretti

Answer 4

I am reluctant to turn off warnings as a matter of principle.

In the case presented, you know well what the exception is. It might be best to just be specific. For example:

try:
    raise RuntimeError("Oops")
except RuntimeError as e:
    print(e, "was handled")

will yield “Oops was handled”.

If there are a couple of possible exceptions, you could use two except clauses. If there could be a multitude of possible exceptions, should one attempt to use a single try-block to handle everything? It might be better to reconsider the design!

Answered By: DeanM

Avoiding "Too broad exception clause" warning in PyCharm

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