MATLAB Programming Fundamentals - MathWorks

Respond to an Exception

In this section...

“Overview” on page 26-19

“The try/catch Statement” on page 26-19

“Suggestions on How to Handle an Exception” on page 26-21

Overview

The MATLAB software, by default, terminates the currently running program when an

exception is thrown. If you catch the exception in your program, however, you can

capture information about what went wrong and deal with the situation in a way that is

appropriate for the particular condition. This requires a try/catch statement.

The try/catch Statement

When you have statements in your code that could generate undesirable results, put

those statements into a try/catch block that catches any errors and handles them

appropriately.

A try/catch statement looks something like the following pseudocode. It consists of two

parts:

• A try block that includes all lines between the try and catch statements.


• A catch block that includes all lines of code between the catch and end statements.

try

Perform one ...

or more operations

A catch ME

Examine error info in exception object ME

Attempt to figure out what went wrong

Either attempt to recover, or clean up and abort

end

B Program continues

The program executes the statements in the try block. If it encounters an error, it skips

any remaining statements in the try block and jumps to the start of the catch block

Respond to an Exception