Use str to get the exception message

[stsewd]

We are catching exceptions of type Exception, which no always have the message attribute (python3 at least).

e = Exception('Bu!')
assert not hasattr(e, 'message')

[humitos]

Nice!

We do have some custom exception where we define a message. Example:

https://github.com/rtfd/readthedocs.org/blob/9958feb644f638de6f8198f50cc0770ff42b980a/readthedocs/doc_builder/exceptions.py#L29

What would happen in those cases?

[stsewd]

@humitos if all the custom exceptions are calling their parent Exception with the message, everything is ok.

https://github.com/rtfd/readthedocs.org/blob/9958feb644f638de6f8198f50cc0770ff42b980a/readthedocs/doc_builder/exceptions.py#L13

[humitos]

Good.

Can you check that all our custom exception are like that?

[stsewd]

These class don't override the init method, so everything is ok

https://github.com/rtfd/readthedocs.org/blob/2c9e62d7458e7d17ea121226fb45c9e57c55c6cd/readthedocs/vcs_support/utils.py#L15-L16

https://github.com/rtfd/readthedocs.org/blob/2c9e62d7458e7d17ea121226fb45c9e57c55c6cd/readthedocs/core/views/hooks.py#L22-L23

https://github.com/rtfd/readthedocs.org/blob/2c9e62d7458e7d17ea121226fb45c9e57c55c6cd/readthedocs/projects/exceptions.py#L52-L61

https://github.com/rtfd/readthedocs.org/blob/2c9e62d7458e7d17ea121226fb45c9e57c55c6cd/readthedocs/core/views/__init__.py#L31-L32

These override the init method correctly

https://github.com/rtfd/readthedocs.org/blob/2c9e62d7458e7d17ea121226fb45c9e57c55c6cd/readthedocs/core/utils/tasks/retrieve.py#L10-L13

https://github.com/rtfd/readthedocs.org/blob/2c9e62d7458e7d17ea121226fb45c9e57c55c6cd/readthedocs/core/utils/tasks/public.py#L103-L107

I found those grepping the project.

[berkerpeksag]

Use of str() may cause problems especially in Python 2. Are we sure that none of these exception messages can contain non-ASCII characters?

Also, I'm probably missing something, but why did use builtins.str instead of just str?

[stsewd]

@berkerpeksag I take the import from http://python-future.org/compatible_idioms.html#unicode

I check for an exception with non-ascii characters, this is what a found

>>> e = Exception('pitón')
>>> str(e)
'pit\xc3\xb3n'
>>> e.message
'pit\xc3\xb3n'
>>> from builtins import str
>>> e = Exception('pitón')
>>> str(e)
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/future/types/newstr.py", line 102, in __new__
    return super(newstr, cls).__new__(cls, value)
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc3 in position 3: ordinal not in range(128)

With the imported str an exception happens. So, are we fine just removing the import?

[berkerpeksag]

Ah, so builtins is coming from the future module. I forgot that there is no builtins module in Python 2. It has been a while since I wrote code in Python 2 :)

I think using future and their implicit imports to do this is a bit bad idea. Even without using its implicit conversation, it's possible to get a UnicodeEncodeError:

>>> e = Exception(u'ıçğü')
>>> str(e)
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode characters in position 0-3: ordinal not in range(128)

(Since Django and other libraries use unicode to store data internally, the chance of getting a unicode exc.message (u'ı' for example) is more than a str ('ı' for example)

I'd be more conservative and don't do this until we get rid of Python 2, but of course this is just my opinion. If we decide to get this in, it would be nice to check if we reach 100% branch coverage (including adding tests for the u'non-ascıı' case) for both usages of str(exc).

[stsewd]

Maybe put this for python 3 milestone is the best

[agjohnson]

I'd prefer to see some tests here, it seems we're disregarding some of our use cases of exceptions here.

More specifically, exceptions that use message.

I agree on holding off here until this either has tests or we're closer to python 3.

[agjohnson]

builtins is third party import

[agjohnson]

We're targeting 3.6 swap in prod in the move to new host. I'll target this at 2.5 milestone for now.

[stsewd]

@agjohnson

it seems we're disregarding some of our use cases of exceptions here.
More specifically, exceptions that use message.

Are you referring to a code that uses e.message? All custom exceptions that I found pass the message attribute to their parent init method (till Exception), so e.message == str(e).

At least an exception change the e.message attribute after instantiating the object.

[stsewd]

Rebased and updated, we could remove the builtins import when dropping the python2 compatibility #4543

[agjohnson]

Prod is 3.6 now, probably time to merge this!