I have a function called by the main program:

try:
    someFunction()
except:
    print "exception happened!"

but in the middle of the execution of the function it raises exception, so it jumps to the except part.

How can I see exactly what happened in the someFunction() that caused the exception to happen?

The other answers all point out that you should not catch generic exceptions, but no one seems to want to tell you why, which is essential to understanding when you can break the “rule”. Here is an explanation. Basically, it’s so that you don’t hide:

• the fact that an error occurred
• the specifics of the error that occurred (error hiding antipattern)

So as long as you take care to do none of those things, it’s OK to catch the generic exception. For instance, you could provide information about the exception to the user another way, like:

• Present exceptions as dialogs in a GUI
• Transfer exceptions from a worker thread or process to the controlling thread or process in a multithreading or multiprocessing application

So how to catch the generic exception? There are several ways. If you just want the exception object, do it like this:

try:
    someFunction()
except Exception as ex:
    template = "An exception of type {0} occurred. Arguments:\n{1!r}"
    message = template.format(type(ex).__name__, ex.args)
    print message

Make sure message is brought to the attention of the user in a hard-to-miss way! Printing it, as shown above, may not be enough if the message is buried in lots of other messages. Failing to get the users attention is tantamount to swallowing all exceptions, and if there’s one impression you should have come away with after reading the answers on this page, it’s that this is not a good thing. Ending the except block with a raise statement will remedy the problem by transparently reraising the exception that was caught.

The difference between the above and using just except: without any argument is twofold:

• A bare except: doesn’t give you the exception object to inspect
• The exceptions SystemExit, KeyboardInterrupt and GeneratorExit aren’t caught by the above code, which is generally what you want. See the exception hierarchy.

If you also want the same stacktrace you get if you do not catch the exception, you can get that like this (still inside the except clause):

import traceback
print traceback.format_exc()

If you use the logging module, you can print the exception to the log (along with a message) like this:

import logging
log = logging.getLogger()
log.exception("Message for you, sir!")

If you want to dig deeper and examine the stack, look at variables etc., use the post_mortem function of the pdb module inside the except block:

import pdb
pdb.post_mortem()

I’ve found this last method to be invaluable when hunting down bugs.

Get the name of the class that exception object belongs:

e.__class__.__name__

and using print_exc() function will also print stack trace which is essential info for any error message.

Like this:

from traceback import print_exc

class CustomException(Exception): pass

try:
    raise CustomException("hi")
except Exception, e:
    print 'type is:', e.__class__.__name__
    print_exc()
    # print "exception happened!"

You will get output like this:

type is: CustomException
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "exc.py", line 7, in <module>
    raise CustomException("hi")
CustomException: hi

And after print and analysis, the code can decide not to handle exception and just execute raise:

from traceback import print_exc

class CustomException(Exception): pass

def calculate():
    raise CustomException("hi")

try:
    calculate()
except Exception, e:
    if e.__class__ == CustomException:
        print 'special case of', e.__class__.__name__, 'not interfering'
        raise
    print "handling exception"

Output:

special case of CustomException not interfering

And interpreter prints exception:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "test.py", line 9, in <module>
    calculate()
  File "test.py", line 6, in calculate
    raise CustomException("hi")
__main__.CustomException: hi

After raise original exception continues to propagate further up the call stack. (Beware of possible pitfall) If you raise new exception it caries new (shorter) stack trace.

from traceback import print_exc

class CustomException(Exception): pass

def calculate():
    raise CustomException("hi")

try:
    calculate()
except Exception, e:
    if e.__class__ == CustomException:
        print 'special case of', e.__class__.__name__, 'not interfering'
        #raise CustomException(e.message)
        raise e
    print "handling exception"

Output:

special case of CustomException not interfering
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "test.py", line 13, in <module>
    raise CustomException(e.message)
__main__.CustomException: hi    

Notice how traceback does not include calculate() function from line 9 which is the origin of original exception e.

You usually should not catch all possible exceptions with try: ... except as this is overly broad. Just catch those that are expected to happen for whatever reason. If you really must, for example if you want to find out more about some problem while debugging, you should do

try:
    ...
except Exception as ex:
    print ex # do whatever you want for debugging.
    raise    # re-raise exception.

Unless somefunction is a very bad coded legacy function, you shouldn’t need what you’re asking.

Use multiple except clause to handle in different ways different exceptions:

try:
    someFunction()
except ValueError:
    # do something
except ZeroDivision:
    # do something else

The main point is that you shouldn’t catch generic exception, but only the ones that you need to. I’m sure that you don’t want to shadow unexpected errors or bugs.

Most answers point to except (…) as (…): syntax (rightly so) but at the same time nobody wants to talk about an elephant in the room, where the elephant is sys.exc_info() function. From the documentation of sys module (emphasis mine):

This function returns a tuple of three values that give information about the exception that is currently being handled.
(…)
If no exception is being handled anywhere on the stack, a tuple containing three None values is returned. Otherwise, the values returned are (type, value, traceback). Their meaning is: type gets the type of the exception being handled (a subclass of BaseException); value gets the exception instance (an instance of the exception type); traceback gets a traceback object (see the Reference Manual) which encapsulates the call stack at the point where the exception originally occurred.

I think the sys.exc_info() could be treated as the most direct answer to the original question of How do I know what type of exception occurred?

try: someFunction() except Exception, exc:

#this is how you get the type
excType = exc.__class__.__name__

#here we are printing out information about the Exception
print 'exception type', excType
print 'exception msg', str(exc)

#It's easy to reraise an exception with more information added to it
msg = 'there was a problem with someFunction'
raise Exception(msg + 'because of %s: %s' % (excType, exc))

These answers are fine for debugging, but for programmatically testing the exception, isinstance(e, SomeException) can be handy, as it tests for subclasses of SomeException too, so you can create functionality that applies to hierarchies of exceptions.

Here’s how I’m handling my exceptions. The idea is to do try solving the issue if that’s easy, and later add a more desirable solution if possible. Don’t solve the issue in the code that generates the exception, or that code loses track of the original algorithm, which should be written to-the-point. However, pass what data is needed to solve the issue, and return a lambda just in case you can’t solve the problem outside of the code that generates it.

path = 'app.p'

def load():
    if os.path.exists(path):
        try:
            with open(path, 'rb') as file:
                data = file.read()
                inst = pickle.load(data)
        except Exception as e:
            inst = solve(e, 'load app data', easy=lambda: App(), path=path)()
    else:
        inst = App()
    inst.loadWidgets()

# e.g. A solver could search for app data if desc='load app data'
def solve(e, during, easy, **kwargs):
    class_name = e.__class__.__name__
    print(class_name + ': ' + str(e))
    print('\t during: ' + during)
    return easy

For now, since I don’t want to think tangentially to my app’s purpose, I haven’t added any complicated solutions. But in the future, when I know more about possible solutions (since the app is designed more), I could add in a dictionary of solutions indexed by during.

In the example shown, one solution might be to look for app data stored somewhere else, say if the ‘app.p’ file got deleted by mistake.

For now, since writing the exception handler is not a smart idea (we don’t know the best ways to solve it yet, because the app design will evolve), we simply return the easy fix which is to act like we’re running the app for the first time (in this case).

To add to Lauritz’s answer, I created a decorator/wrapper for exception handling and the wrapper logs which type of exception occurred.

class general_function_handler(object):
    def __init__(self, func):
        self.func = func
    def __get__(self, obj, type=None):
        return self.__class__(self.func.__get__(obj, type))
    def __call__(self, *args, **kwargs):
        try:
            retval = self.func(*args, **kwargs)
        except Exception, e :
            logging.warning('Exception in %s' % self.func)
            template = "An exception of type {0} occured. Arguments:\n{1!r}"
            message = template.format(type(e).__name__, e.args)
            logging.exception(message)
            sys.exit(1) # exit on all exceptions for now
        return retval

This can be called on a class method or a standalone function with the decorator:

@general_function_handler

See my blog about for the full example: http://ryaneirwin.wordpress.com/2014/05/31/python-decorators-and-exception-handling/

You can start as Lauritz recommended, with:

except Exception as ex:

and then just to print ex like so:

try:
    #your try code here
except Exception as ex:
    print ex

The actual exception can be captured in the following way:

try:
    i = 1/0
except Exception as e:
    print e

You can learn more about exceptions from The Python Tutorial.

Your question is: “How can I see exactly what happened in the someFunction() that caused the exception to happen?”

It seems to me that you are not asking about how to handle unforeseen exceptions in production code (as many answers assumed), but how to find out what is causing a particular exception during development.

The easiest way is to use a debugger that can stop where the uncaught exception occurs, preferably not exiting, so that you can inspect the variables. For example, PyDev in the Eclipse open source IDE can do that. To enable that in Eclipse, open the Debug perspective, select Manage Python Exception Breakpoints in the Run menu, and check Suspend on uncaught exceptions.

Just refrain from catching the exception and the traceback that Python prints will tell you what exception occurred.