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Ruby Programming
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Handling Exceptions

Our jukebox downloads songs from the Internet using a TCP socket. The basic code is simple:

opFile = File.open(opName, "w")
while data = socket.read(512)
  opFile.write(data)
end

What happens if we get a fatal error halfway through the download? We certainly don't want to store an incomplete song in the song list. ``I Did It My *click*''.

Let's add some exception handling code and see how it helps. We enclose the code that could raise an exception in a begin/end block and use rescue clauses to tell Ruby the types of exceptions we want to handle. In this case we're interested in trapping SystemCallError exceptions (and, by implication, any exceptions that are subclasses of SystemCallError), so that's what appears on the rescue line. In the error handling block, we report the error, close and delete the output file, and then reraise the exception.

opFile = File.open(opName, "w")
begin
  # Exceptions raised by this code will
  # be caught by the following rescue clause
  while data = socket.read(512)
    opFile.write(data)
  end

rescue SystemCallError   $stderr.print "IO failed: " + $!   opFile.close   File.delete(opName)   raise end

When an exception is raised, and independent of any subsequent exception handling, Ruby places a reference to the Exception object associated with the exception in the global variable $! (the exclamation point presumably mirroring our surprise that any of our code could cause errors). In the previous example, we used this variable to format our error message.

After closing and deleting the file, we call raise with no parameters, which reraises the exception in $!. This is a useful technique, as it allows you to write code that filters exceptions, passing on those you can't handle to higher levels. It's almost like implementing an inheritance hierarchy for error processing.

You can have multiple rescue clauses in a begin block, and each rescue clause can specify multiple exceptions to catch. At the end of each rescue clause you can give Ruby the name of a local variable to receive the matched exception. Many people find this more readable than using $! all over the place.

begin
  eval string
rescue SyntaxError, NameError => boom
  print "String doesn't compile: " + boom
rescue StandardError => bang
  print "Error running script: " + bang
end

How does Ruby decide which rescue clause to execute? It turns out that the processing is pretty similar to that used by the case statement. For each rescue clause in the begin block, Ruby compares the raised exception against each of the parameters in turn. If the raised exception matches a parameter, Ruby executes the body of the rescue and stops looking. The match is made using $!.kind_of?(parameter), and so will succeed if the parameter has the same class as the exception or is an ancestor of the exception. If you write a rescue clause with no parameter list, the parameter defaults to StandardError.

If no rescue clause matches, or if an exception is raised outside a begin/end block, Ruby moves up the stack and looks for an exception handler in the caller, then in the caller's caller, and so on.

Although the parameters to the rescue clause are typically the names of Exception classes, they can actually be arbitrary expressions (including method calls) that return an Exception class.
Ruby Programming
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