Propagating details of an error upwards in Rust - rust

Question

I would like to have the details of an error be propagated upwards. I used error-chain previously, but that has not been maintained or kept compatible with the rest of the ecosystem as far as i can tell.
For example, in this example:
use std::str::FromStr;
use anyhow::Result;
fn fail() -> Result<u64> {
Ok(u64::from_str("Some String")?)
}
fn main() {
if let Err(e) = fail(){
println!("{:?}", e);
}
The error i am getting is:
invalid digit found in string
I would need the error message to have the key details, including at the point of failure, for example:
- main: invalid digit found in string
- fail: "Some String" is not a valid digit
What's the best way of doing this?

Answer 1

anyhow provides the context() and with_context() methods for that:
use anyhow::{Context, Result};
use std::str::FromStr;
fn fail() -> Result<u64> {
let s = "Some String";
Ok(u64::from_str(s).with_context(|| format!("\"{s}\" is not a valid digit"))?)
}
fn main() {
if let Err(e) = fail() {
println!("{:?}", e);
}
}
"Some String" is not a valid digit
Caused by:
invalid digit found in string
If you want custom formatting, you can use the Error::chain() method:
if let Err(e) = fail() {
for err in e.chain() {
println!("{err}");
}
}
"Some String" is not a valid digit
invalid digit found in string
And if you want additional details (e.g. where the error happened), you can use a custom error type and downcast it (for error source you can also capture a backtrace).

Answer 2

This is a tricky thing to accomplish and I'm not sure that there is a simple and non-invasive way to capture all of the details of any possible error without knowledge of the particular function being invoked. For example, we may want to display some arguments to the function call that failed, but evaluating other arguments might be problematic -- they may not even be able to be turned into strings.
Maybe the argument is another function call, too, so should we capture its arguments or only its return value?
I whipped up this example quickly to show that we can at least fairly trivially capture the exact source expression. It provides a detail_error! macro that takes an expression that produces Result<T, E> and emits an expression that procudes Result<T, DetailError<E>>. The DetailError wraps the original error value and additionally contains a reference to a string of the original source code fed to the macro.
use std::error::Error;
use std::str::FromStr;
#[derive(Debug)]
struct DetailError<T: Error> {
expr: &'static str,
cause: T,
}
impl<T: Error> DetailError<T> {
pub fn new(expr: &'static str, cause: T) -> DetailError<T> {
DetailError { expr, cause }
}
// Some getters we don't use in this example, but should be present to have
// a complete API.
#[allow(dead_code)]
pub fn cause(&self) -> &T {
&self.cause
}
#[allow(dead_code)]
pub fn expr(&self) -> &'static str {
self.expr
}
}
impl<T: Error> Error for DetailError<T> { }
impl<T: Error> std::fmt::Display for DetailError<T> {
fn fmt(&self, f: &mut std::fmt::Formatter) -> Result<(), std::fmt::Error> {
write!(f, "While evaluating ({}): ", self.expr)?;
std::fmt::Display::fmt(&self.cause, f)
}
}
macro_rules! detail_error {
($e:expr) => {
($e).map_err(|err| DetailError::new(stringify!($e), err))
}
}
fn main() {
match detail_error!(u64::from_str("Some String")) {
Ok(_) => {},
Err(e) => { println!("{}", e); }
};
}
This produces the runtime output:
While evaluating (u64::from_str("Some String")): invalid digit found in string
Note that this only shows the string because it's a literal in the source. If you pass a variable/parameter instead, you will see that identifier in the error message instead of the string.

Answer 3

When you run your app with the environment variable RUST_BACKTRACE set to 1 or full, you'll get more error details, without the need to recompile your program. That, however, doesn't mean you're going to get an extra message like "Some String" is not a valid digit, as the parsing function simply doesn't generate such.