Status code 500 not treated as exception

Question

Making a request to the server, as in code below, I've got status code 500, which was not caught as an exception. The output was "500", but I need for all 500 codes to result in sys.exit(). Does requests.exceptions.RequestException not treat 500 as an exception or is it something else? The requests module docs http://docs.python-requests.org/en/latest/user/quickstart/#errors-and-exceptions are not very clear on what falls under this class. How do I make sure that all 500 codes result in sys.exit()?

import requests
import json
import sys

url = http://www.XXXXXXXX.com
headers = {'user':'me'}
try:
    r = requests.post(url, headers=headers)
    status = r.status_code
    response = json.dumps(r.json(), sort_keys=True, separators=(',', ': '))
    print status
except requests.exceptions.RequestException as e:
    print "- ERROR - Web service exception, msg = {}".format(e)
    if r.status_code < 500:
        print r.status_code
    else:
        sys.exit(-1)

Answer 1

A status code 500 is not an exception. There was a server error when processing the request and the server returned a 500; more of a problem with the server than the request.

You can therefore do away with the try-except:

r = requests.post(url, headers=headers)
status = r.status_code
response = json.dumps(r.json(), sort_keys=True, separators=(',', ': '))

if str(status).startswith('5'):
    ...

Answer 2

If you want a successful request, but "non-OK" response to raise an error, call response.raise_for_status(). You can then catch that error and handle it appropriately. It will raise a requests.exceptions.HTTPError that has the response object hung onto the error.