This first edition was written for Lua 5.0.

While still largely relevant for later versions, there are

some differences.
The fourth edition
targets Lua 5.3 and is available at Amazon and other bookstores.
By buying the book, you also help to support the Lua project.

Programming in Lua
Part I. The Language
Chapter 8. Compilation, Execution, and
Errors

8.4 – Error Handling and Exceptions

For many applications,
you do not need to do any error handling in Lua.
Usually, the application program does this handling.
All Lua activities start
from a call by the application,
usually asking Lua to run a chunk.
If there is
any error, this call returns an error code
and the application can take
appropriate actions.
In the case of the stand-alone interpreter,
its main loop
just prints the error message
and continues showing the prompt and running
the commands.

If you need to handle errors in Lua,

you should use the pcall function
(protected call)
to encapsulate your code.

Suppose you want to run a piece of Lua code

and to catch
any error raised
while running that code.
Your first step is to encapsulate that piece of code in
a function; let us call it foo:

function foo ()

...

if unexpected_condition then error() end

...

print(a[i]) -- potential error: `a' may not be a table

...

end

Then, you call foo with pcall:

if pcall(foo) then

-- no errors while running `foo'

...

else

-- `foo' raised an error: take appropriate actions

...

end

Of course, you can call pcall with an anonymous function:

 if pcall(function () ... end) then ...

else ...

The pcall function calls its first argument in

protected mode,
so that it catches
any errors while the function is running.
If there are no errors,
pcall returns
true, plus any values returned by the call.
Otherwise, it returns false, plus the
error message.

Despite its name, the error message does not have to be a string.
Any Lua
value that you pass to error will be returned by pcall:

local status, err = pcall(function () error({code=121}) end)

print(err.code) --> 121

These mechanisms provide all we need to do

exception handling in Lua.
We
throw an exception with error
and catch it with pcall.
The error message
identifies the kind or error.

Copyright © 2003–2004 Roberto Ierusalimschy. All rights reserved.