Python in a Nutshell, 2nd Edition

The warnings Module

Warnings are messages about errors or anomalies that may not be serious enough to be worth disrupting the program’s control flow (as would happen by raising a normal exception). The warnings module affords fine-grained control over which warnings are output and what happens to them. You can conditionally output a warning by calling function warn in module warnings. Other functions in the module let you control how warnings are formatted, set their destinations, and conditionally suppress some warnings (or transform some warnings into exceptions).

Classes

Module warnings supplies several exception classes that represent warnings. Class Warning subclasses Exception and is the base class for all warnings. You may define your own warning classes; they must subclass Warning, either directly or via one of its other existing subclasses, which are:

DeprecationWarning

Uses deprecated features supplied only for backward compatibility

RuntimeWarning

Uses features whose semantics are error-prone

SyntaxWarning

Uses features whose syntax is error-prone

UserWarning

Other user-defined warnings that don’t fit any of the above cases

Objects

Python supplies no concrete warning objects. A warning is composed of a message (a text string), a category (a subclass of Warning), and two pieces of information that identify where the warning was raised from: module (name of the module that raised the warning) and lineno (line number of the source code line that raised the warning). Conceptually, you ...