Error messages from format()

[Colin J. Williams]

Is there some way to get more informative error messages from the 
builtin format?

Most messages are such as:
Traceback (most recent call last):
   File "<interactive input>", line 1, in <module>
ValueError: Invalid conversion specification

This example doesn't point to the first invalid case.

[Dbg]>>> format((25, 31),'{0^9o} a(1:9x}')
Traceback (most recent call last):
   File "<interactive input>", line 1, in <module>
ValueError: Invalid conversion specification

Basically, I'm trying to make use of the format function with Python 
3.2, but find little in the way of examples in the docs.

Colin W.