[Tutor] Python equiv of Perl's 'or die()' syntax

[Remco Gerlich]

On Wed, Jul 19, 2000 at 05:09:07PM -0500, Ben Beuchler wrote:
> Is there a simple equivalent to Perl's 'or die()' syntax?
> 
> Similar to this:
> 
> open( MYFILE, 'filethatdoesnotexist') or die "Help me!!:$!"

In Python, error handling is based on the concept of exceptions.

If you try to read a non-existant file with open, open will raise an
exception. If you don't do anything about it, your program will terminate
with "No such file" and a line number. Nothing special to do there.

Dying is hardly ever a useful solution, unless you have a very small script.
(don't know what that means about Perl idioms, don't know enough Perl).

To catch exceptions, you use the try: except: construct, like

try:
  f = open("filethatdoesnotexist","r")
except IOError:
  print "File open failed!"
  # Do the rest of your error handling...
  

In general, don't look for direct equivalents. Perl is Perl, Python is
Python, they don't do everything in a similar way.

So, I think the answer is "no".
-- 
Remco Gerlich,  scarblac@pino.selwerd.nl