Add property accessor for error messages

[seants]

In python3, it's no longer possible to do error.message.

The official python alternative of str(error) does not work with the stripe library because __str__ is overridden and would print

Request ch_ae7361827ab7: Your card was Declined.

which is not user-friendly. The three alternatives I've identified are

error.args[0]

error._message

super(stripe.error.StripeError, error).__str__()

none of which are super elegant. This PR would allow

error.user_message

instead. Happy to rename it to something else too.

[brandur-stripe]

Hey @seants, thanks a lot for the PR!

So I think in the case of Python 3, the preferred method of extracting a message from an error is now just this:

str(error)

Does that look okay as an alternative to you?

[seants]

Oh sorry I forgot to add that to the description: that doesn’t work for me because that prints

Request ch_1674827andv: your card was declined

And we don’t want to show that first part to the user

[brandur-stripe]

Ah, I see! Thanks for the clarification.

@ob-stripe Do you have an opinion on this one? I could see either doing something similar to the suggested above, and I could also see inverting the problem by removing the "Request xxx: " prefix from the standard string representation and adding a message_with_request method that makes it available.

[seants]

That would've been nice initially but is a breaking change for all clients that depend on that behavior. I could totally imagine someone doing str(error)[20:] to chop that first part off. This PR is kind of a workaround for that so that it can be released anytime.

[seants]

In terms of naming, I was gonna go for user_message but I didn't do a deep-dive into whether that message is always user-friendly. As mentioned, happy to rename.

[brandur-stripe]

Hey @seants, sorry about the dropping the ball here! I think I archived this by accident.

Okay, thank you for explanation on backwards compatibility — agreed. Would you mind renaming the method to user_message like you suggested? I like the name better, and I think that regardless of whether it should be user-facing to an end user, it's always going to be a "user message" from the perspective of Stripe (people who have this library installed are our users). Also, would you mind adding a comment above it that just gives a basic explanation of how it compares to the standard string override?

[seants]

Haha no worries; yes I'll take care of those this weekend!

[seants]

Updated!

[brandur-stripe]

Thanks!

Released as 1.82.0.

[seants]

Thanks!