So far the try statement had always been paired with except clauses. But there is another way to use it as well. The try statement can be followed by a finally clause. Finally clauses are called clean-up or termination clauses, because they must be executed under all circumstances, i.e. a "finally" clause is always executed regardless if an exception occurred in a try block or not.
One very important point is that we can either define an “except” or a “finally” clause with every try block. You can’t club these together. Also, you shouldn’t use the “else” clause along with a “finally” clause.
Example
Given code can be rewritten as follows
try: foo = open ( 'test.txt', 'w' ) foo.write ( "It's a test file to verify try-finally in exception handling!!") print 'try block executed' finally: foo.close () print 'finally block executed'
Output
try block executed finally block executed