How do I catch a numpy warning like it's an exception (not just for testing)?

Question

I have to make a Lagrange polynomial in Python for a project I'm doing. I'm doing a barycentric style one to avoid using an explicit for-loop as opposed to a Newton's divided difference style one. The problem I have is that I need to catch a division by zero, but Python (or maybe numpy) just makes it a warning instead of a normal exception.

So, what I need to know how to do is to catch this warning as if it were an exception. The related questions to this I found on this site were answered not in the way I needed. Here's my code:

import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import warnings

class Lagrange:
    def __init__(self, xPts, yPts):
        self.xPts = np.array(xPts)
        self.yPts = np.array(yPts)
        self.degree = len(xPts)-1 
        self.weights = np.array([np.product([x_j - x_i for x_j in xPts if x_j != x_i]) for x_i in xPts])

    def __call__(self, x):
        warnings.filterwarnings("error")
        try:
            bigNumerator = np.product(x - self.xPts)
            numerators = np.array([bigNumerator/(x - x_j) for x_j in self.xPts])
            return sum(numerators/self.weights*self.yPts) 
        except Exception, e: # Catch division by 0. Only possible in 'numerators' array
            return yPts[np.where(xPts == x)[0][0]]

L = Lagrange([-1,0,1],[1,0,1]) # Creates quadratic poly L(x) = x^2

L(1) # This should catch an error, then return 1. 

When this code is executed, the output I get is:

Warning: divide by zero encountered in int_scalars

That's the warning I want to catch. It should occur inside the list comprehension.

Answer 1

It seems that your configuration is using the print option for numpy.seterr:

>>> import numpy as np
>>> np.array([1])/0   #'warn' mode
__main__:1: RuntimeWarning: divide by zero encountered in divide
array([0])
>>> np.seterr(all='print')
{'over': 'warn', 'divide': 'warn', 'invalid': 'warn', 'under': 'ignore'}
>>> np.array([1])/0   #'print' mode
Warning: divide by zero encountered in divide
array([0])

This means that the warning you see is not a real warning, but it's just some characters printed to stdout(see the documentation for seterr). If you want to catch it you can:

1. Use numpy.seterr(all='raise') which will directly raise the exception. This however changes the behaviour of all the operations, so it's a pretty big change in behaviour.
2. Use numpy.seterr(all='warn'), which will transform the printed warning in a real warning and you'll be able to use the above solution to localize this change in behaviour.

Once you actually have a warning, you can use the warnings module to control how the warnings should be treated:

>>> import warnings
>>> 
>>> warnings.filterwarnings('error')
>>> 
>>> try:
...     warnings.warn(Warning())
... except Warning:
...     print 'Warning was raised as an exception!'
... 
Warning was raised as an exception!

Read carefully the documentation for filterwarnings since it allows you to filter only the warning you want and has other options. I'd also consider looking at catch_warnings which is a context manager which automatically resets the original filterwarnings function:

>>> import warnings
>>> with warnings.catch_warnings():
...     warnings.filterwarnings('error')
...     try:
...         warnings.warn(Warning())
...     except Warning: print 'Raised!'
... 
Raised!
>>> try:
...     warnings.warn(Warning())
... except Warning: print 'Not raised!'
... 
__main__:2: Warning: