Question

I have a ruby script that loops through a list of shortened urls (around 2,000 – 3,000 at a time). At the moment everything is peachy until a hit a url that is malformed, timedout etc. When an error occurs my script dies. How can I setup my loop to skip to the next record when/if such an error occurs.

my loop looks like this:

blah.foo do |barurl|
  mymethod(barurl)

my mymethod looks like this:

def mymethod(barurl)
  begin
    stuff
    ...
    return expandedurl
  rescue
    return "Problem expanding link"
  end
end

Should my begin/end logic be wrapped around my loop instead of the method?

Answer 1

Because you need to skip the malformed url, you should use the exception message to control the loop

blah.foo do |barurl|
  begin
    mymethod(barurl)
  rescue YourTypeOfException
    next
  end
end

and inside the method raise the exception

def mymethod(barurl)
  stuff
  ...
  raise YourTypeOfException, "this url is not valid"
  ...
end