Exceptions

Even though I haven't formally introduced them to you, by now I expect you to at least have a vague idea of what an exception is. In the previous chapters, we've seen that when an iterator is exhausted, calling next on it raises a StopIteration exception. We've met IndexError when we tried accessing a list at a position that was outside the valid range. We've also met AttributeError when we tried accessing an attribute on an object that didn't have it, and KeyError when we did the same with a key and a dictionary. We've also just met AssertionError when running tests.

Now, the time has come for us to talk about exceptions.

Sometimes, even though an operation or a piece of code is correct, there are conditions in which something may go wrong. For example, if we're converting user input from string to int, the user could accidentally type a letter in place of a digit, making it impossible for us to convert that value into a number. When dividing numbers, we may not know in advance...