Code Smell: Error Handling Eclipse | Credibly Curious

[utterances-bot]

Code Smell: Error Handling Eclipse | Credibly Curious

https://www.njtierney.com/post/2023/12/06/long-errors-smell/

[shannonpileggi]

Wonderful post, Nick! Thanks for such a great write up!

[kennedymwavu]

This was very informative & practical! Thank you.

[drmowinckels]

lovely post! Some of this was covered in the Posit::conf dev masterclass, and this was a great reminder and expansion of that!

[njtierney]

Thanks everyone! So very stoked that you liked the post 😄

[jamesmbaazam]

Thanks, Nick. This was really insightful. I think the rlang package is the best thing we never knew we needed as R package developers. On another note, I am currently struggling with including the name of the caller function in warning messages thrown with cli::cli_warn(). Do you have any advise on that? I am tempted to remove them where they're unnecessary and replace them with errors where they are indeed fatal. I saw some advise in the Advanced R book about the awkward nature of R warnings and I'm beginning to think they're not the best way to signal non-fatal issues, especially when you have to catch and manipulate them.

[njtierney]

Thanks for the kind words, @jamesmbaazam !

On another note, I am currently struggling with including the name of the caller function in warning messages thrown with cli::cli_warn()

Have you specified the argument as call = rlang::caller_env()? This way you could control how it is presented to the user, I believe?

[jamesmbaazam]

Yes, I tried that but I think cli::cli_warning() doesn't actually expect a call argument?

[njtierney]

Ah yes I was sort of expecting ... was pass eventually to call, since cli::cli_warning() doesn't have call listed as an argument but it instead gets passed to rlang::warn() via ... https://cli.r-lib.org/reference/cli_abort.html, and ... gets passed to rlang::abort()/rlang::warn()/rlang::inform(). But only rlang::abort() has a call arg.

r-lib/rlang#1496 seems to indicate that rlang::warn() should work?

I'll try and take a look at this when I've got some time, let me know if you have any luck!