[Python-Dev] Exception __name__ missing?

[Ron Adam]

On 01/17/2011 02:27 PM, Georg Brandl wrote:
> Am 17.01.2011 21:22, schrieb Ron Adam:
>>
>> Is this on purpose?
>>
>>
>> Python 3.2rc1 (py3k:88040, Jan 15 2011, 18:11:39)
>> [GCC 4.4.5] on linux2
>> Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>   >>>  Exception.__name__
>> 'Exception'
>>   >>>  e = Exception('has no name')
>>   >>>  e.__name__
>> Traceback (most recent call last):
>>     File "<stdin>", line 1, in<module>
>> AttributeError: 'Exception' object has no attribute '__name__'
>
> It's not on purpose in the sense that it's not something special
> to exceptions.  The class __name__ attribute is not accessible
> from instances of any class.

Yes, I realised this on the way to an appointment.  Oh well. ;-)


What I needed was e.__class__.__name__ instead of e.__name__.

I should have thought about this a little more before posting.



The particular reason I wanted it was to format a nice message for 
displaying in pydoc browser mode.   The server errors, like a missing .css 
file, and any other server related errors, go the server console, while the 
content errors get displayed in a web page.  ie... object not found, or 
some other content related reason for not giving what was asked for.

Doing repr(e) was giving me too much.

     UnicodeDecodeError('utf8', b'\x7fELF\x02\x01\x01\x00\x00\x00\x ....

With pages of bytes, and I'd rather not truncate it, although that would be ok.

str(e) was more useful, but didn't include the exception name.

     'utf8' codec can't decode byte 0xe0 in position 24: invalid 
continuation byte


So doing e.__name__ was the obvious next thing...  for some reason I 
expected the __name__ attribute in exception instances to be inherited from 
the class.  Beats me why. <shrug>

Thanks,
    Ron