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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-20T14:08:41+00:00

I am not able to understand the places where an error handling or where

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I am not able to understand the places where an error handling or where an exception handling should be used. I assume this, if it is an existing framework class there are delegate methods which will facilitate the programmer to send an error object reference and handle the error after that. Exception handling is for cases where an operation of a programmer using some framework classes throws an error and i cannot get an fix on the error object’s reference.

Is this assumption valid ? or how should i understand them ?

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  1. Editorial Team

    You should use exceptions for errors that would never appear if the programmer would have checked the parameters to the method that throws the exception. E.g. divide by 0 or the well known “out of bounds”-exception you get from NSArrays.

    NSErrors are for errors that the programmer could do nothing about. E.g. parsing a plist file. It would be a waste of resources if the program would check if the file is a valid plist before it tries to read its content. For the validity check the program must parse the whole file. And parsing a file to report that it is valid so you can parse it again would be a total waste. So the method returns a NSError (or just nil, which tells you that something went wrong) if the file can’t be parsed.

    The parsing for validity is the “programmer should have checked the parameters” part. It’s not applicable for this type of errors, so you don’t throw a exception.

    In theory you could replace the out of bounds exception with a return nil. But this would lead to very bad programming.

    Apple says:

    Important: In many environments, use of exceptions is fairly commonplace. For example, you might throw an exception to signal that a routine could not execute normally—such as when a file is missing or data could not be parsed correctly. Exceptions are resource-intensive in Objective-C. You should not use exceptions for general flow-control, or simply to signify errors. Instead you should use the return value of a method or function to indicate that an error has occurred, and provide information about the problem in an error object.

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