Basic exception handling in F#

F# has a similar exception handling mechanism like in C# or Java. The most straightforward way to raise an F# exception is by way of the built-in “failwith” function which accepts an exception message:

failwith "This won't work"

Most popular OOP languages come with the try-catch-finally construct to handle exceptions. In F# it is try-with-finally. Let’s look at try-with first:

let basicExceptionRaise =
    try
        failwith "This won't work"
    with
        | Failure message -> printfn "Exception caught: %s" message

The with clause includes pattern matching where Failure will match every exception type. Therefore it’s equivalent of…

catch (Exception ex)
{
}

…in C#. The Failure object has a message property that can be extracted in the with clause. If we run the above function we’ll see “This won’t work” printed in the standard output.

The finally block is used so that a piece of code runs even if there was an exception. It is most often used to clean up resources such as open files or database connections. In F# try-with cannot be mixed directly with finally so the following syntax is incorrect:

let basicExceptionRaise =
    try
        failwith "This won't work"
    with
        | Failure message -> printfn "Exception caught: %s" message
    finally
        printfn "Running the finally block now"

This will result in a compilation error:

Unexpected keyword ‘finally’ in binding. Expected incomplete structured construct at or before this point or other token

Instead, we’ll need two try blocks as follows:

let basicExceptionRaise =
    try
        try
            failwith "This won't work"
        finally
            printfn "Running the finally block now"
    with
        | Failure message -> printfn "Exception caught: %s" message

The finally block will be executed first, here’s the output:

Running the finally block now
Exception caught: This won’t work

We can change the order of the finally and with blocks:

let basicExceptionRaise =
    try
        try
            failwith "This won't work"       
        with
            | Failure message -> printfn "Exception caught: %s" message
    finally
        printfn "Running the finally block now"

…which will result in the with and finally blocks to be executed in a different order:

Exception caught: This won’t work
Running the finally block now

View all F# related articles here.