In this guide we are going to discuss error handling in Ruby. Error handling is important to know when your application has run into a bug, so that you know how to fix it accordingly.

To see how it works, let's start with creating a line of code that will generate an error:

puts 8/0

If you execute it, your application will throw an error.

error_handling.rb:1:in `/': divided by 0 (ZeroDivisionError)
    from error_handling.rb:1:in `<main>'

This code is attempting to divide by zero (which isn't possible), so it's running into a ZeroDivisionError. To handle this error in a more elegant way, the syntax is:

begin 
  puts 8/0
rescue
  puts "Rescued the error"
end

If you run this code, the program will print out: Rescued the error.

Though the error is more elegant, it does not really fix the bug. In fact this implementation is a poor choice when it comes to managing errors. A better way would be to know what the error is, so you can make the right fix.

I hope this gives you an idea of a basic way to handle errors. In coming lessons we'll walk through the proper techniques for implementing error handling in Ruby programs.