Lua -- pcall and xpcall

pcall and xpcall

https://www.tutorialspoint.com/lua/lua_error_handling.htm

In Lua programming, in order to avoid throwing these errors and handling errors, we need to use the functions pcall or xpcall.

The pcall (f, arg1, ...) function calls the requested function in protected mode. If some error occurs in function f, it does not throw an error. It just returns the status of error. A simple example using pcall is shown below.

Live Demo

function myfunction ()
   n = n/nil
end

if pcall(myfunction) then
   print("Success")
else
	print("Failure")
end

When we run the above program, we will get the following output.

Failure

The xpcall (f, err) function calls the requested function and also sets the error handler. Any error inside f is not propagated; instead, xpcall catches the error, calls the err function with the original error object, and returns a status code.

A simple example for xpcall is shown below.

Live Demo

function myfunction ()
   n = n/nil
end

function myerrorhandler( err )
   print( "ERROR:", err )
end

status = xpcall( myfunction, myerrorhandler )
print( status)

When we run the above program, we will get the following output.

ERROR:	test2.lua:2: attempt to perform arithmetic on global 'n' (a nil value)
false

As a programmer, it is most important to ensure that you take care of proper error handling in the programs you write. Using error handling can ensure that unexpected conditions beyond the boundary conditions are handled without disturbing the user of the program.