Less verbose error handling in Go?

Question

I have some Go code that queries a Database using the "database/sql" package. Most of these functions return: result, err or rows, err.

Because of this, you end up with many repetitive blocks like this:

if err != nil {
  // Handle Error
}

I've seen "cleaner" code for functions that only return err:

if err := SomeFunc(); err != nil {
  // Handle Error
}

I can't do this with these functions because the variable gets trapped in the scope when I need to access it in another query function later on.

Is there a way to clean up this go code?

Tangential: if you use sqlx, you can use Get() and Select() to pull, respectively, a single entry or a slice of entries without having to handle a rows variable. Those functions return only an error, and thus work well with the if <statement>; <conditional> { style. sqlx is also just a really amazing library in general. — Kaedys
– Kaedys, Commented Apr 23, 2018 at 20:34

Adrian · Accepted Answer · 2018-04-23 19:15:48Z

4

They're only trapped in scope if they're declared in the if block using :=. If you declare them outside the if, they're in the outer scope:

var err error
var result SomeResultType
if result,err = SomeFunc(); err != nil {
    // Handle error
}
// Do something with result (or error if you want)

answered Apr 23, 2018 at 19:15

Adrian

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2 Comments

Kaedys Over a year ago

Though in this case, simply moving the function call outside the if statement (and using shortform declaration) is actually a more compact code style. Declaring the vars beforehand added 2 lines when moving the statement into the if block saved 1 line. Can work rather well if the vars are already declared for some reason or if you use named returns, though.

Adrian Over a year ago

Either way, it has the same effect of moving the declaration outside the block.

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