handle the no-exception case the empty except clause is sort of wildcard feature--because it catches everythingit allows your handlers to be as general or specific as you like in some scenariosthis form may be more convenient than listing all possible exceptions in try for examplethe following catches everything without listing anythingtryaction(exceptcatch all possible exceptions empty excepts also raise some design issuesthough although convenientthey may catch unexpected system exceptions unrelated to your codeand they may inadvertently intercept exceptions meant for another handler for exampleeven system exit calls and ctrl- key combinations in python trigger exceptionsand you usually want these to pass even worsethe empty except may also catch genuine programming mistakes for which you probably want to see an error message we'll revisit this as gotcha at the end of this part of the book for nowi'll just say"use with care python more strongly supports an alternative that solves one of these problems-catching an exception named exception has almost the same effect as an empty exceptbut ignores exceptions related to system exitstryaction(except exceptioncatch all possible exceptionsexcept exits we'll explore how this form works its voodoo formally in the next when we study exception classes in shortit works because exceptions match if they are subclass of one named in an except clauseand exception is superclass of all the exceptions you should generally catch this way this form has most of the same convenience of the empty exceptwithout the risk of catching exit events though betterit also has some of the same dangers--especially with regard to masking programming errors version skew notesee also the raise statement ahead for more on the as portion of except clauses in try syntacticallypython requires the except as vhandler clause form listed in table - and used in this bookrather than the older except evform the latter form is still available (but not recommendedin python and if usedit' converted to the former the change was made to eliminate confusion regarding the dual role of commas in the older form in this formtwo alternate exceptions are properly coded as except ( )because supports the as form onlycommas in handler clause are always taken to mean tupleregardless of whether parentheses are used or notand the values are interpreted as alternative exceptions to be caught the try/except/else statement