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Is there anything in Python like a try-finally except it still raises exceptions normally?

Suppose I want to run some function in Python, ensuring that whether it fails or not some cleanup code is always run. Something like this:
try: some_function()
finally: cleanup()
Ok, simple enough. But hold up! If any exceptions occur in the try block, they'll be suppressed. So really this construct did more than I wanted. All I really wanted to do was make sure some cleanup code runs after the function whether it finishes successfully or not. I still want any exceptions which occur in my function to happen normally. Perhaps that would look something like this:
do: some_function()
finally: cleanup()
Of course, that isn't real Python code. The actual way which I've found to do this is like follows:
try: some_function()
except Exception as error: raise error
finally: cleanup()
Eww, gross. I'm adding an extra line to re-throw an exception which I wanted to just happen normally in the first place. And additionally the stack trace now has an extra line in it showing the except Exception as error: raise error bit. This seems less than ideal to me, but it also seems to be the only way to accomplish what I'm trying to do.
So is this really the way I'm supposed to go about this?
If yes, then I have a further question: Why doesn't Python have a dedicated construct for simply ensuring some block of code runs whether some other block succeeds or not?
As far as my small mind is concerned, this whole idea has little to do with exception handling, since I don't actually want to keep exceptions from occurring where they normally would in the stack trace. Therefore, forcing people to use a try-except-finally construct seems just weird to me.

Python does!
try:
1/0
finally:
print("Hello, world!")
print("This will not print.")

Alright so as #user2357112 pointed out it looks like I somehow had the wild misconception that the try part of a try-except-finally construct is what catches exceptions. If anyone else gets confused similarly... it's the except bit that does the catching. Pretty obvious after some thinking, but hey everyone has brain farts sometimes.

Get Exit Status of a Nested Function?

I have a function called within a different function. In the nested function, various errors (e.g. improper arguments, missing parameters, etc.) should result in exit status 1. Something like:
if not os.path.isdir(filepath):
print('Error: could not find source directory...')
sys.exit(1)
Is this the correct way to use exit statuses within python? Should I have, instead,
return sys.exit(1)
??? Importantly, how would I reference the exit status of this nested function in the other function once the nested function had finished?

sys.exit() raises a SystemExit exception. Normally, you should not use it unless you really mean to exit your program.
You could catch this exception:
try:
function_that_uses_sys.exit()
except SystemExit as exc:
print exc.code
The .code attribute of the SystemExit exception is set to the proposed exit code.
However, you should really use a more specific exception, or create a custom exception for the job. A ValueError might be appropriate here, for example:
if not os.path.isdir(filepath):
raise ValueError('Error: could not find source directory {!r}'.format(filepath))
then catch that exception:
try:
function_that_may_raise_valueerror()
except ValueError as exc:
print "Oops, something went wrong: {}".format(exc.message)

By using sys.exit, you typically signal that you want the entire program to end. If you want to handle the error in a calling function, you should probably have the inner function raise a more specific exception instead. (You could catch the exception raised by SystemExit, but it would be a rather awkward way to pass error information out.)

I guess that the right thing to do is this:
if not os.path.isdir(filepath):
raise ValueError('the given filepath is not a directory')
However, the code as it stands still could be improved. One point is that a path to a file should never be a directory, so that is not an exceptional state. Maybe what you want is to just name it path without adding an unintended connotations.
Further, and that has actual functional implications, you are still not guaranteed to be able to access a directory there even if isdir() returns true! The reason is that something could have switched the thing under your feet, typically a malicious attacker, or, more simple, you could simply not have the rights to access it. If you care, you should rather just open the directory and handle the according errors instead of trying in advance to determine if something in the future will fail. This is in general a better approach, as the "normal" code doesn't get cluttered by such checks and you also don't pay any albeit small performance penalty except when an error occurs.

Most reliable way of exiting out of a function on a failed try

What is the best way to except out of ALL potential errors?
## Try to...
try:
## Print
print "hi"
## On failure to get data
except Exception:
## Exit out of current function
return
or
## Try to...
try:
## Print
print "hi"
## On failure to get data
except:
## Exit out of current function
return
or are there better ways?
Thanks in advance
- Hyflex

Generally, always catch specific errors you know will occur. Especially if you catch everything, (That is, except:) you will catch KeyboardInterrupt and make your program not be stoppable by Ctrl+C; SystemExit that is used to kill a thread, and so forth... While catching Exception is slightly better, it will still lose too much context; the exceptional condition that occurs might be other than you expected. Thus always catch IOError, ValueError, TypeError and so forth, by their names.
Update
There is 1 case where you want to use except Exception; at a top level of a program, or an action where you want to make sure that the whole program does not crash due to an uncaught Exception.

Never use a bare except:. If you do, you'll wind up catching things like SystemExit and KeyboardInterrupt, which are not intended to be caught in most code.
Ideally, you should try to be as specific as possible - for example, catching IOError for a failing print. If you can't predict exactly what exceptions you're concerned about, then at the very least you should use except Exception to avoid the aforementioned problem.

Handling Exceptions with else clause

The Python Tutorial states:
The try ... except statement has an optional else clause, which,
when present, must follow all except clauses. It is useful for code
that must be executed if the try clause does not raise an exception.
For example:
for arg in sys.argv[1:]:
try:
f = open(arg, 'r')
except IOError:
print 'cannot open', arg
else:
print arg, 'has', len(f.readlines()), 'lines'
f.close()
The use of the else clause is better than adding additional code
to the try clause because it avoids accidentally catching an exception
that wasn’t raised by the code being protected by the try ... except
statement.
Question 1>　Ａｆｔｅｒ reading the above document, I still don't get the idea why we cannot simply move the code from else clause into try clause.
Question 2> How does try clause can accidentally catch an exception since all those catches are done in the except clause, right?

You could put the else code in the try suite, but then you'd catch any exceptions that might be raised there. If you didn't intend that to happen, it would be "accidental," hence the wording of the document you linked to.
Best practice is to put as little code as possible in a try block, so that when an error occurs, you know what operation caused it and can handle it appropriately. If you have five lines of code in a try block and only expect one of them to ever raise an exception, your exception-handling code will be ill-prepared when an exception occurs in a line you didn't expect it to. Better in that case to let the exception be raised than handle it the wrong way.

If you move the code from the else into the try then that becomes part of the "critical path" which can raise an exception. If f.readlines() raises some sort of exception (perhaps an I/O error while reading the file because of a bad sector on the disk) then that error will be conflated with the one error that you currently catch. (Technically the "cannot open" error message would be wrong at that point ... because opening a file can succeed when reading it later fails; in fact opening it must succeed before you can even get an I/O error while processing it).
Normally you'd use a pattern more like:
foo = None
try:
# some code to access/load/initialize foo from an external source
except ...:
# handle various types of file open/read, database access, etc errors
else:
foo = something
... so that your subsequently run code and simply check if foo is None and use it or
work around it's unavailability in whatever way you see fit.

Answer for both questions is similar,
If you move code to the try clause, then you can not be sure from where the exception is coming from. Thus if you have another line of code that produces an unexpected IOError you could end searching for a problem where there is not.
So to better disect your code you want to simplify as much as possible the lines in the try making the catch as especific as possible.

1) Of course you could just move code from the else clause into the try clause. You could move it outside of the try block entirely, but this allows extra flexibility, and further modulation of the code. Also, perhaps specificity with the errors being caught. You could list a whole load of different exceptions that might be likely to happen, each with different statements. The stuff in the else clause would still only happen if no exception was raised, after the execution of the final line in the try block. e.g. printing a successful return message.
Also, try clauses add some extra CPU overhead with regards to garbage collection management and error tracing, so anything outside of the try clause is not protected in the same manner and may run more efficiently.
2) Error catching is quite specific. e.g. The except clause in your above example will only be run if an IOError is raised when running the f = open(arg,'r') line. If you want to catch any form of exception, use except Exception:.

Python Ignore Exception and Go Back to Where I Was

I know using below code to ignore a certain exception, but how to let the code go back to where it got exception and keep executing? Say if the exception 'Exception' raises in do_something1, how to make the code ignore it and keep finishing do_something1 and process do_something2? My code just go to finally block after process pass in except block. Please advise, thanks.
try:
do_something1
do_something2
do_something3
do_something4
except Exception:
pass
finally:
clean_up
EDIT:
Thanks for the reply. Now I know what's the correct way to do it. But here's another question, can I just ignore a specific exception (say if I know the error number). Is below code possible?
try:
do_something1
except Exception.strerror == 10001:
pass
try:
do_something2
except Exception.strerror == 10002:
pass
finally:
clean_up
do_something3
do_something4

There's no direct way for the code to go back inside the try-except block. If, however, you're looking at trying to execute these different independant actions and keep executing when one fails (without copy/pasting the try/except block), you're going to have to write something like this:
actions = (
do_something1, do_something2, #...
)
for action in actions:
try:
action()
except Exception, error:
pass

update. The way to ignore specific exceptions is to catch the type of exception that you want, test it to see if you want to ignore it and re-raise it if you dont.
try:
do_something1
except TheExceptionTypeThatICanHandleError, e:
if e.strerror != 10001:
raise
finally:
clean_up
Note also, that each try statement needs its own finally clause if you want it to have one. It wont 'attach itself' to the previous try statement. A raise statement with nothing else is the correct way to re-raise the last exception. Don't let anybody tell you otherwise.
What you want are continuations which python doesn't natively provide. Beyond that, the answer to your question depends on exactly what you want to do. If you want do_something1 to continue regardless of exceptions, then it would have to catch the exceptions and ignore them itself.
if you just want do_something2 to happen regardless of if do_something1 completes, you need a separate try statement for each one.
try:
do_something1()
except:
pass
try:
do_something2()
except:
pass
etc. If you can provide a more detailed example of what it is that you want to do, then there is a good chance that myself or someone smarter than myself can either help you or (more likely) talk you out of it and suggest a more reasonable alternative.

This is pretty much missing the point of exceptions.
If the first statement has thrown an exception, the system is in an indeterminate state and you have to treat the following statement as unsafe to run.
If you know which statements might fail, and how they might fail, then you can use exception handling to specifically clean up the problems which might occur with a particular block of statements before moving on to the next section.
So, the only real answer is to handle exceptions around each set of statements that you want to treat as atomic

you could have all of the do_something's in a list, and iterate through them like this, so it's no so wordy. You can use lambda functions instead if you require arguments for the working functions
work = [lambda: dosomething1(args), dosomething2, lambda: dosomething3(*kw, **kwargs)]
for each in work:
try:
each()
except:
pass
cleanup()

Exceptions are usually raised when a performing task can not be completed in a manner intended by the code due to certain reasons. This is usually raised as exceptions. Exceptions should be handled and not ignored. The whole idea of exception is that the program can not continue in the normal execution flow without abnormal results.
What if you write a code to open a file and read it? What if this file does not exist?
It is much better to raise exception. You can not read a file where none exists. What you can do is handle the exception, let the user know that no such file exists. What advantage would be obtained for continuing to read the file when a file could not be opened at all.
In fact the above answers provided by Aaron works on the principle of handling your exceptions.

I posted this recently as an answer to another question. Here you have a function that returns a function that ignores ("traps") specified exceptions when calling any function. Then you invoke the desired function indirectly through the "trap."
def maketrap(*exceptions):
def trap(func, *args, **kwargs):
try:
return func(*args, **kwargs)
except exceptions:
return None
return trap
# create a trap that ignores all exceptions
trapall = maketrap(Exception)
# create a trap that ignores two exceptions
trapkeyattrerr = maketrap(KeyError, AttributeError)
# Now call some functions, ignoring specific exceptions
trapall(dosomething1, arg1, arg2)
trapkeyattrerr(dosomething2, arg1, arg2, arg3)
In general I'm with those who say that ignoring exceptions is a bad idea, but if you do it, you should be as specific as possible as to which exceptions you think your code can tolerate.

Python 3.4 added contextlib.suppress(), a context manager that takes a list of exceptions and suppresses them within the context:
with contextlib.suppress(IOError):
print('inside')
print(pathlib.Path('myfile').read_text()) # Boom
print('inside end')
print('outside')
Note that, just as with regular try/except, an exception within the context causes the rest of the context to be skipped. So, if an exception happens in the line commented with Boom, the output will be:
inside
outside