Where can I find python's built-in classes' methods and attributes? [closed]

Question

I'm trying to find out which methods and attributes come with the mother of all exception classes in python: the Exception class. However, I'm having a bit of trouble since the official documentation doesn't seem to provide it.

The best I could find was this: http://docs.python.org/library/exceptions.html but that only lists the built-in exceptions.

What's going on? I'm used to the Java and PHP documentations where everything is laid down on the table :(

Answer 1

The built-in function dir will give a list of names comprising the methods and attributes of an object.

>>>print dir(Exception)
['__class__', '__delattr__', '__dict__', '__doc__', '__format__', '__getattribut
e__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__', '__hash__', '__init__', '__new__', '__reduc
e__', '__reduce_ex__', '__repr__', '__setattr__', '__setstate__', '__sizeof__',
'__str__', '__subclasshook__', '__unicode__', 'args', 'message']

You can also get help using the help method: help(Exception).

Answer 2

There's only one interesting attribute on BaseException, and that's args. This is documented, so there's no problem.

There are no methods on BaseException other than the special (__) methods, which you should not call directly. Of these, __str__ is documented by the sentence

If str() or unicode() is called on an instance of this class, the representation of the argument(s) to the instance are returned, or the empty string when there were no arguments.

[There is one more public attribute, message, but if you access that you will get a DeprecationWarning. Deprecated attributes are not always documented since you shouldn't use them in new code.]