md5 search using exceptions

Question

import httplib
import re 

md5 = raw_input('Enter MD5: ') 

conn = httplib.HTTPConnection("www.md5.rednoize.com")
conn.request("GET", "?q="+ md5) 
try:
     response = conn.getresponse()
     data = response.read() 
     result = re.findall('<div id="result" >(.+?)</div', data)
     print result
except:
     print "couldnt find the hash"

raw_input()

I know I'm probably implementing the code wrong, but which exception should I use for this? if it cant find the hash then raise an exception and print "couldnt find the hash"

Answer 1

Since re.findall doesn't raise exceptions, that's probably not how you want to check for results. Instead, you could write something like

result = re.findall('<div id="result" >(.+?)</div', data)
if result:
    print result
else:
    print 'Could not find the hash'