Generic way to avoid pylints broad-except?

Question

PEP8 doesn't like broad exception handling like

try:
    do_something()
except Exception:
    handle_exception()

I know, there are good reasons for this like SystemExit and KeyboardInterrupt being handled in an un-inteded way or missing important error-cases.

But sometimes I think I have to handle "all other" exceptions like in this case:

while True:
    try:
        result = handle_request(get_request())
    except (all, my, known, exceptions) as ex:
        sophisticated_exception_handling()
    except (KeyboardInterrupt, SystemExit):
        raise
    except Exception as ex:
        # handle exotic situations which just didn't happen before
        result = "something bad happened: %r" % ex

In this example I don't want to have my message loop interrupted just because some sub routine raises an exception I just didn't think about yet.

Of course I could just # pylint: disable this line to get no warning - but that doesn't feel like the most sophisticated answer.

So my question is:

Is there some cool approach to nicely handle all exceptions and thus never fall out of my message handling loop without just ignoring a PEP8 warning?

Answer 1

Looks like you have a "special case, based on practicality, which should beat purity" mentioned in PEP20:

Special cases aren't special enough to break the rules.
Although practicality beats purity.

... and...

Errors should never pass silently.
Unless explicitly silenced.

I believe your code does not violate PEP20 (aka The Zen of Python)