Exception processing: rescue

Prev | Contents | Next

| Ruby user's guide | Exception processing: rescue |

An executing program can run into unexpected problems. A file that it it wants to read might not exist; the disk might be full when it wants to save some data; the user may provide it with some unsuitable kind of input.

    ruby> file = open("some_file")
    ERR: (eval):1:in `open': No such file or directory - some_file

A robust program will handle these situations sensibly and gracefully. Meeting that expectation can be an exasperating task. C programmers are expected to check the result of every system call that could possibly fail, and immediately decide what is to be done:

    FILE *file = fopen("some_file", "r");
    if (file == NULL) {
      fprintf( stderr, "File doesn't exist.\n" );
      exit(1);
    }
    bytes_read = fread( buf, 1, bytes_desired, file );
    if (bytes_read != bytes_desired ) {
      /* do more error handling here ... */
    }
    ...

This is such a tiresome practice that programmers can tend to grow careless and neglect it, and the result is a program that doesn't handle exceptions well. On the other hand, doing the job right can make programs hard to read, because there is so much error handling cluttering up the meaningful code.

In ruby, as in many modern languages, we can handle exceptions for blocks of code in a compartmentalized way, thus dealing with surprises effectively but not unduly burdening either the programmer or anyone else trying to read the code later. The block of code marked with `begin` executes until there is an exception, which causes control to be transferred to a block of error handling code, which is marked with `rescue`. If no exception occurs, the `rescue` code is not used. The following method returns the first line of a text file, or `nil` if there is an exception:

    def first_line( filename )
      begin
        file = open("some_file")
        info = file.gets
        file.close
        info  # Last thing evaluated is the return value
      rescue
        nil   # Can't read the file? then don't return a string
      end
    end

There will be times when we would like to be able to creatively work around a problem. Here, if the file we want is unavailable, we try to use standard input instead:

    begin
      file = open("some_file")
    rescue
      file = STDIN