What does the Raise keyword do in Python

Question

Hi all,

My question is fairly simple. Please do check out the following piece of code:

try:
    raise Exception("x")
except:
    try:
        raise Exception("y")
    finally:
        raise

Here I am aware that the Exception: x will be raised. But I want it to raise the exception y.

So my question is that why does the final raise call always raise the primary exception but no the last exception?

Is it how it works or am I missing something here?

All help appreciated!

Answer 1

Hi!

I think I can answer this - Let us say we are making use of Python 2.6 for this scenario.

As of my understanding, you want the finally block to be matched with the block where the exception y resides, correct?

So the finally block is basically matched to the first try block and not the consecutive ones is what you should note.

But, then again if you wanted to add an except block which is present in the inner try block - then in this case alone the finally block will raise exception B.

Check out this code:

try:
  raise Exception("x")
except:
  try:
    raise Exception("y")
  except:
    pass
  finally:
    raise

And this is the output to the code:

Traceback (most recent call last):
 File "test.py", line 5, in <module>
   raise Exception("y")
Exception: y

Let me give you another example for better clarity:

try:
 raise Exception("x")
except:
 try:
   raise Exception("y")
 except:
   raise

Now check out the output:

Traceback (most recent call last):
 File "test.py", line 7, in <module>
   raise Exception("y")
Exception: y

So as you see here, basically what we did is that by replacing the finally block with except we ended up raising the exception B as per your requirement.

Hope this helped!