Error handling | Lua by Example

Try-catch style

pcall stands for “protected call”. It is used to add error handling to functions. pcall works similar as try-catch in other languages.

function square(a)
    return a * "a"
end

local status, retval = pcall(square, 10);
print("Status: ", status)
print("Return Value: ", retval)

Status:         false
Return Value:   temp.lua:2: attempt to mul a 'number' with a 'string'

Opaque error handling

If we don’t want a function to crash a program even in case of an error, it is standard in lua to do the following:

function foo(tab)
    if type(tab) ~= "table" then return nil, "Argument 1 is not a table!" end
    return tab.a
end -- This never crashes the program, but simply returns nil and an error message

if foo(20) then print(foo(20)) end -- prints nothing
result, error = foo(20)
if result then print(result) else print(error) end

Argument 1 is not a table!