When do I use which function?

Here’s the recommendation from the Control.Exception documentation:

• If you want to do some cleanup in the event that an exception is raised, use finally, bracket or onException.
• To recover after an exception and do something else, the best choice is to use one of the try family.
• … unless you are recovering from an asynchronous exception, in which case use catch or catchJust.

try :: Exception e => IO a -> IO (Either e a)

try takes an IO action to run, and returns an Either. If the computation succeeded, the result is given wrapped in a Right constructor. (Think right as opposed to wrong). If the action threw an exception of the specified type, it is returned in a Left constructor. If the exception was not of the appropriate type, it continues to propagate up the stack. Specifying SomeException as the type will catch all exceptions, which may or may not be a good idea.

Note that if you want to catch an exception from a pure computation, you will have to use evaluate to force evaluation within the try.

main = do
    result <- try (evaluate (5 `div` 0)) :: IO (Either SomeException Int)
    case result of
        Left ex  -> putStrLn $ "Caught exception: " ++ show ex
        Right val -> putStrLn $ "The answer was: " ++ show val

catch :: Exception e => IO a -> (e -> IO a) -> IO a

catch is similar to try. It first tries to run the specified IO action, but if an exception is thrown the handler is given the exception to get an alternative answer.

main = catch (print $ 5 `div` 0) handler
  where
    handler :: SomeException -> IO ()
    handler ex = putStrLn $ "Caught exception: " ++ show ex

However, there is one important difference. When using catch your handler cannot be interrupted by an asynchroneous exception (i.e. thrown from another thread via throwTo). Attempts to raise an asynchroneous exception will block until your handler has finished running.

Note that there is a different catch in the Prelude, so you might want to do import Prelude hiding (catch).

handle :: Exception e => (e -> IO a) -> IO a -> IO a

handle is simply catch with the arguments in the reversed order. Which one to use depends on what makes your code more readable, or which one fits better if you want to use partial application. They are otherwise identical.

tryJust, catchJust and handleJust

Note that try, catch and handle will catch all exceptions of the specified/inferred type. tryJust and friends allow you to specify a selector function which filters out which exceptions you specifically want to handle. For example, all arithmetic errors are of type ArithException. If you only want to catch DivideByZero, you can do:

main = do
    result <- tryJust selectDivByZero (evaluate $ 5 `div` 0)
    case result of
        Left what -> putStrLn $ "Division by " ++ what
        Right val -> putStrLn $ "The answer was: " ++ show val
  where
    selectDivByZero :: ArithException -> Maybe String
    selectDivByZero DivideByZero = Just "zero"
    selectDivByZero _ = Nothing

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A note on purity

Note that this type of exception handling can only happen in impure code (i.e. the IO monad). If you need to handle errors in pure code, you should look into returning values using Maybe or Either instead (or some other algebraic datatype). This is often preferable as it’s more explicit so you always know what can happen where. Monads like Control.Monad.Error makes this type of error handling easier to work with.

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See also:

• Control.Exception