Learn Programming

1625 readers

1 users here now

Posting Etiquette

Ask the main part of your question in the title. This should be concise but informative.
Provide everything up front. Don't make people fish for more details in the comments. Provide background information and examples.
Be present for follow up questions. Don't ask for help and run away. Stick around to answer questions and provide more details.
Ask about the problem you're trying to solve. Don't focus too much on debugging your exact solution, as you may be going down the wrong path. Include as much information as you can about what you ultimately are trying to achieve. See more on this here: https://xyproblem.info/

Icon base by Delapouite under CC BY 3.0 with modifications to add a gradient

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

Ategon@programming.dev

JaumeI@programming.dev

bugsmith@programming.dev

Is it better to check if a file exists before trying to load it, or to try to load it, and catch the error and move on? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 2 months ago by Binette@lemmy.ml to c/learn_programming@programming.dev

16 comments fedilink hide all child comments

For context, I am trying to do a save system for a game.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] henfredemars@infosec.pub 59 points 2 months ago

I’m sorry that you’re getting differing answers to your question, but I strongly feel that you should attempt to load it and handle the error if it does not exist.

The reason is because if you rely on checking first, it’s always possible that something could happen to the file between when you check and when you perform the load. Plus, you should be prepared to handle the exceptional condition in general. What if you have something strange like the file exists but you don’t have permission to read it?

Because you should implement handling for those errors anyway, you might as well use it as your main means of processing a file that doesn’t exist. That is my suggestion. You can still check before trying to load, but you need to handle the case of the file not existing when you’re loading.