# Copyright 2013-2016 Lars Wirzenius # # This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify # it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by # the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or # (at your option) any later version. # # This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, # but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of # MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the # GNU General Public License for more details. # # You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License # along with this program. If not, see . # # =*= License: GPL-3+ =*= import hashlib import textwrap class StructuredError(Exception): '''A structured error exception. A structured exception is meant to specify highly specific errors in its type. Rather than getting a formatted message string as its initialiser argument (e.g., "raise Exception('Something went wrong')"), the message is an attribute of the StructuredError subclass. Each message gets a separate sub-class: instead of a few fairly generic exceptions, you're expected to create very specific ones. For example, instead of, say, InputOutputError, you might define FileNotFoundError, or even ConfigFileDoesNotExistError, as well as ConfigFilePermissionDeniedError. More specific exceptions make it easier to handle specific error cases, whether by catching only specific ones, or by grepping log files for them. Structured errors get a set of keyword arguments to the initialiser, and use them to fill in templates in a message string attribute of the exception class. In addition, each structured exception has a unique ID, computed from the class name, which can be used, for example, as a user-visible error code. The ID is prepended to the message. The ID could also be used to look up translations, though that is not currently implemented. The ID will also make translated log files more greppable. The msg attribute is a format string. It can be arbitrarily long. The __str__ method returns the first line only, but the full message can be retrieved using the formatted() method. The convention is to have the first line be a short summary of the problem, and have the full message provide additional, helpful information to the user. The format string uses syntax according to the str.format specification (not the old % interpolation), in order to ease eventual migration to Python 3. To use structured error exceptions, subclass this class for each error condition, and add a msg attribute to the subclass. There is no such attribute in this base class, to prevent you from using it directly. Example: class NoLasagnaError(StructuredError): msg = 'Lunch is {lunch} instead of lasagna.' That's all the subclass needs to do. The caller must then provide the right keyword arguments: these are verified when the ``str`` is called on the exception object. If the caller has not provided all the required arguments, an unformatted error message is provided, plus a note of what arguments are missing, and all the arguments that were provided. It's not an error to provide extra keyword arguments. ''' msg = None def __init__(self, **kwargs): Exception.__init__(self) self.kwargs = kwargs @property def id(self): '''A semi-unique ID for this exception class. The ID is computed from the name of the class and the module it is in, using a checksum. There is no guarantee of uniqueness, but the likelihood of collisions is low. The ID is of the form RabcdeX, where abcde is five hexadecimal digits. The R prefix and the X suffix are there to make it easier to grep for the error code in large log files: they reduce the number of accidental hits compared to grepping just for the hexadecimal digits. R and X were chosen because they're pretty. ''' summer = hashlib.md5() summer.update(self.__class__.__name__) summer.update(self.__class__.__module__) shorthash = summer.hexdigest()[:5] return 'R{0}X'.format(shorthash.upper()) def _format_msg(self, template): # In case template is a docstring, remove leading whitespace # from lines. lines = template.splitlines(True) if len(lines) == 0: dedented = '' else: dedented = (textwrap.dedent(lines[0]) + textwrap.dedent(''.join(lines[1:]))) try: formatted_msg = dedented.format(**self.kwargs) except KeyError as e: # If there were any errors in the formatting of the message, # report them here. We do NOT want replace the actual error # message, because that would hide information from the user. # We do want to know there was an error, though. formatted_msg = '{0} (PROGRAMMING ERROR: {1} {2})'.format( dedented, repr(e), repr(self.kwargs)) formatted = '{0}: {1}'.format(self.id, formatted_msg) return formatted.rstrip() def formatted(self): '''Return the full formatted message. Note that the returned string will NOT end in whitespace. If the format string ends in, say, a newline, it is stripped away. ''' return self._format_msg(self.msg) def __str__(self): full = self.formatted() lines = full.splitlines() assert lines return lines[0]