How to skip only a specific type of error in for-loop in R?

Question

I am looping over read_xlsx (from readxl library) to read multiple sheets in an excel. However, if there's an error that the sheet (specified with a certain name - "missing" in below example) is not present, I want it to be ignored and the loop should continue. But at the same time if there's any other error (say related to calculations), then that should not be ignored and thrown as error, while stopping the loop. How to do this?

Note: I used tryCatch / try; they both ignore all types of errors (learning from this answer).

sheets=c("name1","name2","missing","name3")  
for (k in sheets) {
    tryCatch({temp=read_xlsx("someexcel.xlsx",sheet = k,col_names = F)
    some_calc=mean(temp[1,])},error=function(e){})
}

Humpelstielzchen · Accepted Answer · 2019-07-15 08:08:14Z

2

You could try this:

test <- function(x) {
  tryCatch(x,
           error = function(e) {if(conditionMessage(e) == "It's an error") {print("no problem")
                               } else {
                                   stop("It's another error")}
                                                                 })
}

> test(stop("It's an error"))
[1] "no problem"

> test(stop("Mayday mayday"))
 Error in value[[3L]](cond) : It's another error

conditionMessage captures the error message, so you can evaluate it and act accordingly.

For it to do nothing just "do nothing" {} when the condition is true.

answered Jul 15, 2019 at 8:08

Humpelstielzchen

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3 Comments

Dayne Over a year ago

Great! Worked perfectly. Just had to customize the error with the looping variable. Just one small thing. In the else section, how to ensure that the original error (which would have been thrown without tryCatch) is displayed instead of (or besides) the customized error?

Humpelstielzchen Over a year ago

Awesome! Just do stop(conditionMessage(e)) inside else .

Dayne Over a year ago

Ignore! Got the answer. Just added conditionMessage(e). Worked.

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