Exceptions and modules / namespaces question

[Preston Landers]

This is a question about modules / namespaces and exceptions.
It's probably been asked before, but.... I looked in the Python FAQ
and did some searches on Google (& Groups) and didn't turn up
anything.

I've run into this thing a couple of times before, but I was always
able to work around it or avoid it, but I'd like to understand what's
going on here, because it's probably just a problem with my
understanding.

The problem, in a nutshell, is that I can't seem to catch an exception
in the same module it was defined in if the function that raised the
exception is in a different module, because of naming issues.

-------module2.py:

import module1

def raise_foo_exception():
   raise module1.FooException("HELLO")

-------module1.py:

import exceptions, sys

class FooException(exceptions.Exception):
   pass

def main():

   try:
       import module2
       module2.raise_foo_exception()
   except FooException, e:
       print "Got it!"
   except:
       xi = sys.exc_info()
       print "Didn't get it.  Got this instead:", xi[0], xi[1]

if __name__ == "__main__":
   main()

---------result:

Didn't get it.  Got this instead: module1.FooException HELLO



The question is, how do I explicitly catch FooException in main()
without doing a catch-all except: and then examining the type of my
exception, and making a decision based on that.  It's kinda clunky.

thanks,

Preston Landers
pibble at yahoo.com