Implementation:Cohere ai Cohere python ApiError

Knowledge Sources	Cohere Python SDK
Domains	SDK, Error Handling
Last Updated	2026-02-15 14:00 GMT

Overview

Custom exception class for API errors that captures HTTP status code, response headers, and response body.

Description

The ApiError class is a subclass of Python's built-in Exception and serves as the base error type raised when Cohere API calls return non-success HTTP responses. It stores the HTTP response headers, status code, and the parsed response body so that callers can inspect the full details of a failure. The class also provides a human-readable __str__ representation that includes all three attributes.

Usage

Catch ApiError in a try/except block around any Cohere SDK method call to handle API-level failures gracefully. Inspect the status_code attribute to branch on specific HTTP error codes and the body attribute to extract error messages returned by the API.

Code Reference

Source Location

• Repository: Cohere Python SDK
• File: src/cohere/core/api_error.py

Signature

class ApiError(Exception):
    headers: Optional[Dict[str, str]]
    status_code: Optional[int]
    body: Any

    def __init__(
        self,
        *,
        headers: Optional[Dict[str, str]] = None,
        status_code: Optional[int] = None,
        body: Any = None,
    ) -> None: ...

    def __str__(self) -> str: ...

Import

from cohere.core.api_error import ApiError

I/O Contract

Inputs

Name	Type	Required	Description
headers	Optional[Dict[str, str]]	No	HTTP response headers returned by the API. Defaults to None.
status_code	Optional[int]	No	HTTP status code of the failed response. Defaults to None.
body	Any	No	Parsed response body containing error details. Defaults to None.

Outputs

Name	Type	Description
headers	Optional[Dict[str, str]]	The HTTP response headers stored on the exception instance.
status_code	Optional[int]	The HTTP status code stored on the exception instance.
body	Any	The parsed response body stored on the exception instance.
__str__()	str	Human-readable string in the format: headers: {...}, status_code: ..., body: ...

Usage Examples

import cohere
from cohere.core.api_error import ApiError

client = cohere.Client(api_key="your-api-key")

try:
    response = client.v2.chat(
        model="command-r-plus",
        messages=[{"role": "user", "content": "Hello"}],
    )
except ApiError as e:
    print(f"API error {e.status_code}: {e.body}")
    if e.status_code == 429:
        print("Rate limited - retrying after backoff")

Related Pages

• Environment:Cohere_ai_Cohere_python_Python_SDK_Runtime