Adding Context to Errors
The widely used anyhow crate can help you add contextual information to your errors and allows you to have fewer custom error types:
use std::{fs, io}; use std::io::Read; use anyhow::{Context, Result, bail}; fn read_username(path: &str) -> Result<String> { let mut username = String::with_capacity(100); fs::File::open(path) .context(format!("Failed to open {path}"))? .read_to_string(&mut username) .context("Failed to read")?; if username.is_empty() { bail!("Found no username in {path}"); } Ok(username) } fn main() { //fs::write("config.dat", "").unwrap(); match read_username("config.dat") { Ok(username) => println!("Username: {username}"), Err(err) => println!("Error: {err:?}"), } }
anyhow::Result<V>
is a type alias forResult<V, anyhow::Error>
.anyhow::Error
is essentially a wrapper aroundBox<dyn Error>
. As such it’s again generally not a good choice for the public API of a library, but is widely used in applications.- Actual error type inside of it can be extracted for examination if necessary.
- Functionality provided by
anyhow::Result<T>
may be familiar to Go developers, as it provides similar usage patterns and ergonomics to(T, error)
from Go.