[Tutor] looking for some general advice

[Michael Klier]

Alan Gauld wrote:
> 1) Best to be specific in your except clauses. Generic 
> catch-anything type clauses can lead to misleading error 
> messages. They are OKmat the top level of a program for 
> distribution as a way of shielding innocent users from stack 
> traces but during development and especially inside your 
> code its better to catch specific exceptions.
> 
> 2) Rather than putting the exception name in quotes 
> "IndexError" just leave the quotes off and raise/catch the 
> error class directly.

Ah, ok. I already wondered why one "IndexError" wasn`t caught even
though I tried to access a list item which was out of range. After
removing the quotes it worked.

Also, what would be the right exception to raise if not enough arguments
were passed to a programm?

> 3) argv = sys.argv 
> Doesn't really achieve much, you might as well just use sys.argv, 
> it's not much extra typing! nit-picking...

You`re right, it`s not much extra typing :).

> 4) For completeness you could avoid the os.system call to 
> wget and implement it as a Python function using the ftplib 
> library... (But to be honest wget is a lot easier!) Or maybe 
> use the new subprocess module instead of os.system.
> You might also want to check that wget executed successfully.

I`ll take your advice about checking wegts exist status and thanks for
the tip with ftplib, although I think it`s a bit too much for my state
of python knowledge right now.

> Othewise I don't see too much to complain about.
> 
> Well done, a good first program.

Thank you, and thanks for the reply.

Regards
Michael

-- 
Michael Klier
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