The best-laid plans of mice and men
Often go awry"Tae a Moose", Robert Burns
Sometimes, things just go wrong. It's important to have a plan for when the inevitable happens. Rust has rich support for handling errors that may (let's be honest: will) occur in your programs.
There are two main kinds of errors that can occur in your programs: failures, and panics. Let's talk about the difference between the two, and then discuss how to handle each. Then, we'll discuss upgrading failures to panics.
Rust uses two terms to differentiate between two forms of error: failure, and panic. A failure is an error that can be recovered from in some way. A panic is an error that cannot be recovered from.
What do we mean by "recover"? Well, in most cases, the possibility of an error
is expected. For example, consider the parse
`parse` function:
"5".parse();
This method converts a string into another type. But because it's a string, you can't be sure that the conversion actually works. For example, what should this convert to?
fn main() { "hello5world".parse(); }"hello5world".parse();
This won't work. So we know that this function will only work properly for some inputs. It's expected behavior. We call this kind of error a failure.
On the other hand, sometimes, there are errors that are unexpected, or which
we cannot recover from. A classic example is an assert!
`assert!`:
assert!(x == 5);
We use assert!
`assert!to declare that something is true. If it's not true, something is very wrong. Wrong enough that we can't continue with things in the current state. Another example is using the
unreachable!()` macro:
use Event::NewRelease; enum Event { NewRelease, } fn probability(_: &Event) -> f64 { // real implementation would be more complex, of course 0.95 } fn descriptive_probability(event: Event) -> &'static str { match probability(&event) { 1.00 => "certain", 0.00 => "impossible", 0.00 ... 0.25 => "very unlikely", 0.25 ... 0.50 => "unlikely", 0.50 ... 0.75 => "likely", 0.75 ... 1.00 => "very likely", } } fn main() { println!("{}", descriptive_probability(NewRelease)); }
This will give us an error:
error: non-exhaustive patterns: `_` not covered [E0004]
While we know that we've covered all possible cases, Rust can't tell. It doesn't know that probability is between 0.0 and 1.0. So we add another case:
use Event::NewRelease; enum Event { NewRelease, } fn probability(_: &Event) -> f64 { // real implementation would be more complex, of course 0.95 } fn descriptive_probability(event: Event) -> &'static str { match probability(&event) { 1.00 => "certain", 0.00 => "impossible", 0.00 ... 0.25 => "very unlikely", 0.25 ... 0.50 => "unlikely", 0.50 ... 0.75 => "likely", 0.75 ... 1.00 => "very likely", _ => unreachable!() } } fn main() { println!("{}", descriptive_probability(NewRelease)); }use Event::NewRelease; enum Event { NewRelease, } fn probability(_: &Event) -> f64 { // real implementation would be more complex, of course 0.95 } fn descriptive_probability(event: Event) -> &'static str { match probability(&event) { 1.00 => "certain", 0.00 => "impossible", 0.00 ... 0.25 => "very unlikely", 0.25 ... 0.50 => "unlikely", 0.50 ... 0.75 => "likely", 0.75 ... 1.00 => "very likely", _ => unreachable!() } } fn main() { println!("{}", descriptive_probability(NewRelease)); }
We shouldn't ever hit the _
`_case, so we use the
unreachable!()macro to indicate this.
unreachable!()gives a different kind of error than
Result`.
Rust calls these sorts of errors panics.
Option
`Optionand
` and Result
`Result`The simplest way to indicate that a function may fail is to use the Option<T>
type. For example, the find
`findmethod on strings attempts to find a pattern in a string, and returns an
Option`:
let s = "foo"; assert_eq!(s.find('f'), Some(0)); assert_eq!(s.find('z'), None);
This is appropriate for the simplest of cases, but doesn't give us a lot of
information in the failure case. What if we wanted to know why the function
failed? For this, we can use the Result<T, E>
type. It looks like this:
enum Result<T, E> { Ok(T), Err(E) }
This enum is provided by Rust itself, so you don't need to define it to use it
in your code. The Ok(T)
`Ok(T)variant represents a success, and the
Err(E)variant represents a failure. Returning a
Resultinstead of an
Option` is recommended
for all but the most trivial of situations.
Here's an example of using Result
`Result`:
#[derive(Debug)] enum Version { Version1, Version2 } #[derive(Debug)] enum ParseError { InvalidHeaderLength, InvalidVersion } fn parse_version(header: &[u8]) -> Result<Version, ParseError> { if header.len() < 1 { return Err(ParseError::InvalidHeaderLength); } match header[0] { 1 => Ok(Version::Version1), 2 => Ok(Version::Version2), _ => Err(ParseError::InvalidVersion) } } let version = parse_version(&[1, 2, 3, 4]); match version { Ok(v) => { println!("working with version: {:?}", v); } Err(e) => { println!("error parsing header: {:?}", e); } }
This function makes use of an enum, ParseError
, to enumerate the various
errors that can occur.
The Debug
`Debug` trait is what lets us print the enum value using the {:?}
`{:?}` format operation.
panic!
`panic!`In the case of an error that is unexpected and not recoverable, the panic!
`panic!`
macro will induce a panic. This will crash the current thread, and give an error:
panic!("boom");
gives
thread '<main>' panicked at 'boom', hello.rs:2
when you run it.
Because these kinds of situations are relatively rare, use panics sparingly.
In certain circumstances, even though a function may fail, we may want to treat
it as a panic instead. For example, io::stdin().read_line(&mut buffer)
returns
a Result<usize>
, when there is an error reading the line. This allows us to
handle and possibly recover from error.
If we don't want to handle this error, and would rather just abort the program,
we can use the unwrap()
`unwrap()` method:
io::stdin().read_line(&mut buffer).unwrap();
unwrap()
`unwrap()will
` will panic!
`panic!if the
` if the Result
`Resultis
` is Err
`Err`. This basically says "Give
me the value, and if something goes wrong, just crash." This is less reliable
than matching the error and attempting to recover, but is also significantly
shorter. Sometimes, just crashing is appropriate.
There's another way of doing this that's a bit nicer than unwrap()
`unwrap()`:
let mut buffer = String::new(); let num_bytes_read = io::stdin().read_line(&mut buffer) .ok() .expect("Failed to read line");
ok()
`ok()converts the
Resultinto an
` into an Option
`Option, and
`, and expect()
`expect()does the same thing as
unwrap(), but takes a message. This message is passed along to the underlying
panic!`, providing a better error message if the code errors.
try!
`try!`When writing code that calls many functions that return the Result
`Resulttype, the error handling can be tedious. The
try!` macro hides some of the boilerplate
of propagating errors up the call stack.
It replaces this:
fn main() { use std::fs::File; use std::io; use std::io::prelude::*; struct Info { name: String, age: i32, rating: i32, } fn write_info(info: &Info) -> io::Result<()> { let mut file = File::create("my_best_friends.txt").unwrap(); if let Err(e) = writeln!(&mut file, "name: {}", info.name) { return Err(e) } if let Err(e) = writeln!(&mut file, "age: {}", info.age) { return Err(e) } if let Err(e) = writeln!(&mut file, "rating: {}", info.rating) { return Err(e) } return Ok(()); } }use std::fs::File; use std::io; use std::io::prelude::*; struct Info { name: String, age: i32, rating: i32, } fn write_info(info: &Info) -> io::Result<()> { let mut file = File::create("my_best_friends.txt").unwrap(); if let Err(e) = writeln!(&mut file, "name: {}", info.name) { return Err(e) } if let Err(e) = writeln!(&mut file, "age: {}", info.age) { return Err(e) } if let Err(e) = writeln!(&mut file, "rating: {}", info.rating) { return Err(e) } return Ok(()); }
With this:
fn main() { use std::fs::File; use std::io; use std::io::prelude::*; struct Info { name: String, age: i32, rating: i32, } fn write_info(info: &Info) -> io::Result<()> { let mut file = File::create("my_best_friends.txt").unwrap(); try!(writeln!(&mut file, "name: {}", info.name)); try!(writeln!(&mut file, "age: {}", info.age)); try!(writeln!(&mut file, "rating: {}", info.rating)); return Ok(()); } }use std::fs::File; use std::io; use std::io::prelude::*; struct Info { name: String, age: i32, rating: i32, } fn write_info(info: &Info) -> io::Result<()> { let mut file = File::create("my_best_friends.txt").unwrap(); try!(writeln!(&mut file, "name: {}", info.name)); try!(writeln!(&mut file, "age: {}", info.age)); try!(writeln!(&mut file, "rating: {}", info.rating)); return Ok(()); }
Wrapping an expression in try!
`try!will result in the unwrapped success (
Ok) value, unless the result is
Err, in which case
Err` is returned early from
the enclosing function.
It's worth noting that you can only use try!
`try!from a function that returns a
Result, which means that you cannot use
try!inside of
main(), because
main()` doesn't return anything.
try!
`try!makes use of [
From