Try catch statements in C

c
Andrew picture Andrew · May 14, 2012 · Viewed 225.3k times · Source

I was thinking today about the try/catch blocks existent in another languages. Googled for a while this but with no result. From what I know, there is not such a thing as try/catch in C. However, is there a way to "simulate" them?
Sure, there is assert and other tricks but nothing like try/catch, that also catch the raised exception. Thank you

Answer

JaredPar picture JaredPar · May 14, 2012

C itself doesn't support exceptions but you can simulate them to a degree with setjmp and longjmp calls.

static jmp_buf s_jumpBuffer;

void Example() { 
  if (setjmp(s_jumpBuffer)) {
    // The longjmp was executed and returned control here
    printf("Exception happened here\n");
  } else {
    // Normal code execution starts here
    Test();
  }
}

void Test() {
  // Rough equivalent of `throw`
  longjmp(s_jumpBuffer, 42);
}

This website has a nice tutorial on how to simulate exceptions with setjmp and longjmp