error-handling.md

Error Handling

In the previous chapters, we have seen a lot of Must prefixed methods like MustNavigate, MustElement, etc. They all have non-prefixed versions like Navigate, Element, etc. The main difference between them is how they handle errors. It's not special for Rod, you can find it in the standard library like this one.

The methods like MustNavigate and MustElement are commonly used in example code or quick scripting. They are useful for jobs like smoke testing, site monitoring, end-to-end test, etc. Jobs with lots of uncertainty, such as web scraping, the non-prefixed version will be a better choice.

The prefixed version is just the non-prefixed version wrapped with an error checker. Here's the source code of the MustElement, as you can see it just calls the Element with several extra lines to panic if err is not nil:

func (p *Page) MustElement(selectors ...string) *Element {
    el, err := p.Element(selectors...)
    if err != nil {
        panic(err)
    }
	return el
}

Get the error value

The two code blocks below are almost doing the same thing in two styles.

The style below will usually end up in less code, but it may also catch extra errors:

page := rod.New().MustConnect().MustPage("https://example.com")

err := rod.Try(func() {
    fmt.Println(page.MustElement("a").MustHTML())
})
handleError(err)

We use rod.Try to catch the error from the Must prefixed methods MustElement and MustHTML.

The style below is the Go's standard way to handle errors. Usually, it's more consistent and precise:

page := rod.New().MustConnect().MustPage("https://example.com")

el, err := page.Element("a")
if err != nil {
    handleError(err)
    return
}
html, err := el.HTML()
if err != nil {
    handleError(err)
    return
}
fmt.Println(html)

Check the error type

We use Go's standard way to check error types, no magic.

The handleError in the above code may look like:

func handleError(err error) {
    var evalErr *rod.ErrEval
    if errors.Is(err, context.DeadlineExceeded) { // timeout error
        fmt.Println("timeout err")
    } else if errors.As(err, &evalErr) { // eval error
        fmt.Println(evalErr.LineNumber)
    } else if err != nil {
        fmt.Println("can't handle", err)
    }
}

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