Python Requests Error Handling

Error handling is very important in scenarios of network requests and interactions with external systems;

Why error handling is needed

1. Ensure program stability; programs without error handling will crash or stop executing directly when encountering exceptions, which is particularly dangerous in production environments.
2. Deal with uncontrollable factors; such as network connection quality, server response time, whether the server is online, etc.
3. Handle and diagnose problems; by capturing and handling exceptions, you can record error logs and capture error details, which will help with subsequent debugging and troubleshooting.
4. Improve user experience; without error handling, users may encounter program crashes or unresponsiveness. With error handling, you can provide users with friendly prompts to explain the problem and suggest the next step. For example, when the network is interrupted, you can tell the user to try again later.
5. Ensure data integrity; if the program does not handle errors when certain operations fail, data loss or inconsistency may occur. By performing error handling before and after key operations, data integrity and security can be ensured.
6. Deal with API changes; when interacting with external APIs, the API may change, such as interface format, status code, etc.

No error handling vs. error handling

Code without error handling:

import requests

response = requests.get("https://example.com/api/data")
print(response.json())

If the request fails or the API is unavailable, the program will crash directly and throw an exception, and the user will not understand what went wrong.

There is error handling code

import requests

try:
    response = requests.get("https://example.com/api/data")
    response.raise_for_status()
    data = response.json()
    print(data)
except requests.exceptions.HTTPError as http_err:
    print(f"HTTP error occurred: {http_err}")
except requests.exceptions.ConnectionError as conn_err:
    print(f"Connection error occurred: {conn_err}")
except requests.exceptions.Timeout as timeout_err:
    print(f"Timeout error occurred: {timeout_err}")
except requests.exceptions.RequestException as req_err:
    print(f"An error occurred: {req_err}")

In this example, the program is able to handle different types of errors and give appropriate feedback without crashing.

Common Requests Error List