ruff/docs/rules/bare-except.md

bare-except (E722)

Derived from the pycodestyle linter.

What it does

Checks for bare except catches in try-except statements.

Why is this bad?

A bare except catches BaseException which includes KeyboardInterrupt, SystemExit, Exception, and others. Catching BaseException can make it hard to interrupt the program (e.g., with Ctrl-C) and disguise other problems.

Example

try:
    raise(KeyboardInterrupt("You probably don't mean to break CTRL-C."))
except:
    print("But a bare `except` will ignore keyboard interrupts.")

Use instead:

try:
    do_something_that_might_break()
except MoreSpecificException as e:
    handle_error(e)

References

• PEP 8
• Python: "Exception hierarchy"
• Google Python Style Guide: "Exceptions"