Explain the best way to handle exceptions

Handling exceptions effectively is crucial in programming to ensure that applications are resilient and can recover gracefully from errors. Here are the key strategies to handle exceptions:

  • Use Try-Catch Blocks: Enclose code that may throw exceptions in a try block and handle exceptions with catch blocks.
  • Specific Exception Handling: Catch specific exceptions before the general ones. This allows you to provide more detailed responses for different error types.
  • Logging Exceptions: Log exceptions to record errors for future analysis. This helps in debugging and improving the application.
  • Graceful Degradation: Provide meaningful messages to users and possibly fallback options when an error occurs.
  • Finally Block: Use a finally block to execute code that must run regardless of whether an exception was thrown (e.g., closing files or releasing resources).
  • Custom Exception Classes: Create custom exception classes to handle application-specific errors more effectively.

Below is a simple example of handling exceptions in PHP:

<?php class CustomException extends Exception {} function riskyFunction() { throw new CustomException("Something went wrong!"); } try { riskyFunction(); } catch (CustomException $e) { echo "Caught custom exception: " . $e->getMessage(); } catch (Exception $e) { echo "Caught general exception: " . $e->getMessage(); } finally { echo "This block runs regardless of exception."; } ?>

exception handling try-catch custom exceptions error handling exception logging graceful degradation