Catching an exception in Swift using functions!

Recently we had a need in a general way to catch calls that can throw an exception.

at
Just another code monkey
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31 Aug 2016•1 min read

Recently we had a need in a general way to catch calls that can throw an exception.

Like with any functional or semi-functional language it is fairly easy to create weird looking constructs with Swift.

Let’s create one but first a function that simply throws an error:

func throwAnError() throws -> Void {
    throw DivisionError.ByZero
}

If we call throwAnError() it must be surrounded by a do...catch block.

do {
    try throwAnError()
} catch let error as NSError {
    print("Unable to divide by zero:", error)
} catch {
    print("Failed miserably and have no idea what happened.")
}

And it is all great until we have to call throwAnError() many many times in many different places… For that we can create a function that will do that for us!

func printError(completion: () throws -> Void)
{
    do {
        try completion()
    } catch let error as NSError {
        print("Unable to divide by zero:", error)
    } catch {
        print("Failed miserably and have no idea what happened.")
    }
}

And now we can simply run it as a block: