Many errors, when trapped by an exception handler, provide a value that contains information about the error. This value can be a string or a list, depending on the error.

To obtain this value, supply a variable name with the exception handler's except statement. For example:

x = "hello"

try:
    x = x - 3
except TypeError, errmsg:
    print "Error:", errmsg

This code raises an error when you try to subtract from a variable containing a string. When the error is raised, the errmsg variable contains information about the error. In this case, the output is:

Error: unsupported operand type(s) for -: 'str' and 'int'

	For information on the values that are provided with errors, see the Built-in Exceptions section of the Python documentation.