Language independent exception handling on SWIG

This is quite useful when wrapping code using SWIG for several languages. By adding this snippet to my interface definition file:

// Language independent exception handler
%include exception.i    

%exception {
  try {
      $action
  } catch(string& stringReason) {
      const char* sData = (char*)stringReason.c_str();
      SWIG_exception(SWIG_RuntimeError,sData);
  } catch(...) {
      SWIG_exception(SWIG_RuntimeError,"Unknown exception");
  }
}

I can do this on C++:

  if (dbSpace.count(dbId))  {
   throw string("dbId already in use");
  }

and catch native runtime exceptions on Python or Java:

try:
   myObject.doSomething(3)
except RuntimeError, e:
   print e

>> dbId already in use