In Django, how can I get an exception's message?

Question

In a view function, I have something like:

try:
    url = request.POST.get('u', '')
    if len(url) == 0:
        raise ValidationError('Empty URL')
except ValidationError, err:
    print err

The output is a string: [u'Empty URL']

When I try to pass the error message to my template (stuffed in a dict, something like { 'error_message': err.value }), the template successfully gets the message (using {{ error_message }}).

The problem is that I get the exact same string as above, [u'Empty URL'], with the [u'...']!

How do I get rid of that?

(Python 2.6.5, Django 1.2.4, Xubuntu 10.04)

Answer 1

ValidationError actually holds multiple error messages.

The output of print err is [u'Empty URL'] because that is the string returned by repr(err.messages) (see ValidationError.__str__ source code).

If you want to print a single readable message out of a ValidationError, you can concatenate the list of error messages, for example:

    # Python 2 
    print '; '.join(err.messages)

    # Python 3
    print('; '.join(err.messages))