Groovy catch block not catching MultipleCompilationErrorsException

Question

I am trying to catch an exception ( MultipleCompilationErrorsException ) but am having a hard time doing so (actually I am trying to catch all types of errors and exceptions if that matters). Here is what I have tried:

try {
    some erroneous crap here
    println("wtf! A")
} catch(Throwable all) {
    println("caught!")
}

This works. caught! is shown as the output.

---

try {
    try some erroneous crap here
    println("wtf! A")
} catch(Throwable all) {
    println("caught!")
}

This code errors out with:

org.codehaus.groovy.control.MultipleCompilationErrorsException: startup failed: /tmp/g.groovy: 2: expecting '{', found 'some' @ line 2, column 9. try some crap here ^

1 error

---

So now that I have the exception name, I tried:

try {
    try some erroneous crap here
    println("wtf! A")
} catch(MultipleCompilationErrorsException e) {
    println("caught!")
}

This errors out exactly like the above:

org.codehaus.groovy.control.MultipleCompilationErrorsException: startup failed: /tmp/g.groovy: 2: expecting '{', found 'some' @ line 2, column 9. try some crap here ^

1 error

Can someone tell me what I am missing? How does one catch such an error/exception?

Answer 1

"Try Catch's" are generally used to handle exceptions that may pop up during the run time of your code. For example, you can try to run a command that requires a certain plugin/library to be imported but if the user doesn't have the respective plugin/library, then the "catch" will handle this exception.

In your case, it seems that you are trying to handle an actual error with the code syntax within your try block. The try block cannot run at all if the syntax is not correct (this would be the compilation error). My best advice would be to try running what ever is inside your try block first to see if it will throw an exception and then implement a try catch block.