eslint: Ignore `catch` block in the `no-empty` rule

Problem

The following is very common pattern when you don’t care about an exception:

try {
  foo();
} catch (err) {}

But it’s caught by the no-empty rule.

I want the rule to catch empty blocks, but ignore the catch block as it’s empty because it’s required by JS, not because I want it there.

I know I can put in a // empty comment there, but that feels like an unuseful reiteration of the obvious.

Possible solution 1

Ignore catch by default as it’s required to be empty and not really useful to require it not to be empty. This is the preferred solution.

Possible solution 2

Add an option that defines exceptions in the form of keywords:

{
  "no-empty": [2, {"exceptions": "catch"}]
}

About this issue

Original URL
State: closed
Created 9 years ago
Comments: 15 (11 by maintainers)

Most upvoted comments

@sindresorhus We provide a way to customize this behavior, if I’m not mistaken this code will lint just fine

try {
    foo();
} catch(err) {
    // I want application to not crush, but don't care about the message
}

Any comment inside a block will mark it as non-empty. Leaving comments in the cases where you used try catch but ignoring cache is a good idea, if somebody else is going to be looking at your code. But in general, I do see your point.

ilyavolodin on Jun 20, 2015

@sindresorhus

The following is very common pattern when you don’t care about an exception:

try {
  foo();
} catch (err) {}

This is a HORRIBLE, HORRIBLE pattern that, unfortunately, is very common in javascript. But it shouldn’t be perpetuated explicitly or implicitly. At the very least you should provide a comment explaining why you are ignoring that exception. Better yet, you should do an instanceof check to only ignore Errors of a certain type, and rethrow all others, which would also satisfy this rule.

p.s. Excuse me for the strong formatting, but good error handling is something I feel VERY STRONGLY about. 😄

danny-andrews on Aug 16, 2017

jslint has an IMO nice approach where if you name the variable ignore, well, then, it’s ignored. And it complains if the variable named ignore is used in a catch block. I’d assume it comes with the option to disable/enable I guess. Would that work for eslint?

aliak00 on Apr 1, 2016