Without seeing more of your code, I'm not sure what you are doing
wrong. This works:
vvvvvvvv ex.py vvvvvvvvvvvvvv
def xopen(path):
try:
return open(path)
except IOError, e:
print 'Error:', e.args[1]
xopen('xyzzy')
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
$ python ex.py
Error: No such file or directory
Could you give us the traceback?