bruce bedouglas at earthlink.net posted: > perl has the concept of "die". does python have anything > similar. how can a python app be stopped?
I see this sort of statement a lot in Perl: open(FH, "myfile.txt") or die ("Could not open file"); I've no idea why you're asking for the Python equivalent to die, but if it's for this sort of case, you don't need it. Usually in Python you don't need to explicitly check for an error. The Python function will raise an exception instead of returning an error code. If you want to handle the error, enclose it in a try/except block. But if you just want the program to abort with an error message so that you don't get silent failure, it will happen automatically if you don't catch the exception. So the equivalent Python example looks something like this: fh = file("myfile.txt") If the file doesn't exist, and you don't catch the exception, you get something like this: $ ./foo.py Traceback (most recent call last): File "./foo.py", line 3, in ? fh = file("myfile.txt") IOError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: 'myfile.txt' /Dan -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list