Python warnings system#
Astropy uses the Python warnings
module to issue warning messages. The
details of using the warnings module are general to Python, and apply to any
Python software that uses this system. The user can suppress the warnings
using the python command line argument -W"ignore"
when starting an
interactive python session. For example:
$ python -W"ignore"
The user may also use the command line argument when running a python script as follows:
$ python -W"ignore" myscript.py
It is also possible to suppress warnings from within a python script. For
instance, the warnings issued from a single call to the
astropy.io.fits.writeto
function may be suppressed from within a Python
script using the warnings.filterwarnings
function as follows:
>>> import warnings
>>> from astropy.io import fits
>>> warnings.filterwarnings('ignore', category=UserWarning, append=True)
>>> fits.writeto(filename, data, overwrite=True)
An equivalent way to insert an entry into the list of warning filter specifications
for simple call warnings.simplefilter
:
>>> warnings.simplefilter('ignore', UserWarning)
Astropy includes its own warning classes,
AstropyWarning
and
AstropyUserWarning
. All warnings from Astropy are
based on these warning classes (see below for the distinction between them). One
can thus ignore all warnings from Astropy (while still allowing through
warnings from other libraries like Numpy) by using something like:
>>> from astropy.utils.exceptions import AstropyWarning
>>> warnings.simplefilter('ignore', category=AstropyWarning)
Warning filters may also be modified just within a certain context using the
warnings.catch_warnings
context manager:
>>> with warnings.catch_warnings():
... warnings.simplefilter('ignore', AstropyWarning)
... fits.writeto(filename, data, overwrite=True)
As mentioned above, there are actually two base classes for Astropy warnings.
The main distinction is that AstropyUserWarning
is
for warnings that are intended for typical users (e.g. “Warning: Ambiguous
unit”, something that might be because of improper input). In contrast,
AstropyWarning
warnings that are not
AstropyUserWarning
may be for lower-level warnings
more useful for developers writing code that uses Astropy (e.g., the
deprecation warnings discussed below). So if you’re a user that just wants to
silence everything, the code above will suffice, but if you are a developer and
want to hide development-related warnings from your users, you may wish to still
allow through AstropyUserWarning
.
Astropy also issues warnings when deprecated API features are used. If you
wish to squelch deprecation warnings, you can start Python with
-Wi::Deprecation
. This sets all deprecation warnings to ignored. There is
also an Astropy-specific AstropyDeprecationWarning
which can be used to disable deprecation warnings from Astropy only.
See the CPython documentation for more information on the -W argument.