Is there a way to properly have GDAL raise exceptions in Python?

Question

I am working with GDAL in Python and have wanted to get GDAL to raise exceptions so that I can do something useful with them. For instance if a file cannot be opened with gdal.Open() I would like to throw an exception instead of gdal returning None. I would just like a way to capture the errors instead of them being dumped to sys.stdout.

Currently I have tried using the gdal.UseExceptions() function but came across an issue. When gdal.UseExceptions() is set it seems to hide certain errors and not raise an exception on them. For instance ERROR 5: Access window out of range in RasterIO() Requested (1,15) of size 25x3 on raster of 26x17 disappears and no exception is raised. This seems pretty dangerous.

Any ideas are appreciated, thanks.

Answer 1

/*
** We do not want to interfere with warnings or debug messages since
** they won't be translated into exceptions.
*/
if (eclass == CE_Warning || eclass == CE_Debug ) {
    pfnPreviousHandler(eclass, code, msg );
}

The UseExceptions handler doesn't listen to anything other than CE_Error, or CE_Fatal. What you're seeing is probably a CE_Warning or CE_Debug message (check the return value of your functional call to see what it's equal to).

This compromise was made to make sure that the "new" python bindings behaved similarly to the "old" python bindings (which where hand-rolled with all error handling being of the check-the-return type). I agree this kind of sucks.

Feel free to file a ticket so we can add levels for the exception handler to listen to, ala

UseExceptions(level=CE_Warning)
UseExceptions(level=CE_Debug)