Laravel's "rescue" Helper Function is Amazing

March 23, 2022

The rescue function is an alternative to the traditional try/catch block syntax required when you want to manually handle a thrown exception. It takes a callback and executes it inside of a try block for you. The result of the callback will be returned if no exception is thrown.

Let’s look at a typical use-case of a try/catch block.

$country = 'USA';

try {
    $alpha2 = (new ISO3166)->alpha3($country)['alpha2'];
} catch (\Exception $e) {
    $alpha2 = null;
}

What an ugly piece of code for something that is really quite simple.

rescue to the rescue

Now let’s see that using our fancy new rescue function.

$alpha2 = rescue(fn () => (new ISO3166)->alpha3($country)['alpha2']);

What happens here is when the callback executes without an exception being thrown, what’s returned from the callback is assigned to our $alpha2 variable. If an exception is thrown, $alpha2 is assigned null.

But what if you don’t want the value to be assigned null? Well, you have some options.

First, you can return a different value. For example, you may want to get false back instead. That’s where rescue’s second parameter comes in:

$isFalse = rescue(function () {
  throw new Exception;
}, false);

Second, you can make the second parameter a callback, where you can do anything you’d normally do inside of a catch block, and whatever is returned from that callback is returned from rescue if an exception is thrown. You’ll even get the exception as an argument to your callback.

rescue(function () {
  throw new Exception;
}, function ($e) {
  // do exception related stuff

  return false;
});

// => false

I don’t think this function adds a ton of utility when you’re in a situation where you’re passing two callbacks to it. However, when you just want to attempt to do something in your first callback and get a different value if it fails, rescue is a handy little helper function.

In my opinion, functions like rescue are what make programming fun. They strip away the syntax-y parts that are distracting, and can leave you with a clean block of code that focuses on what it’s actually doing. It’s the epitome of clean code. A simple, reusable, beautiful, little function that allows you to ditch the hideousness of the try/catch block when you can.

For your reading pleasure, here is a real, live coding sample that I’ve written.

public function getCountryByFormat(string $country, CountryFormat $format): array|null
{
    return rescue(fn () => match ($format) {
        CountryFormat::NAME    => (new ISO3166)->name($country),
        CountryFormat::ALPHA_2 => (new ISO3166)->alpha2($country),
        CountryFormat::ALPHA_3 => (new ISO3166)->alpha3($country),
        CountryFormat::NUMERIC => (new ISO3166)->numeric($country),
    }, null, false);
}

NOTE: That third parameter of false tells the function not to report the exception to the error logger. Since we are kind of expecting this exception, we don’t want to report it. Watch out for that potential gotcha.

For comparison’s sake, here’s what it would look like in a try/catch block.

public function getCountryByFormat(string $country, CountryFormat $format): array|null
{
    try {
        return match ($format) {
            CountryFormat::NAME    => (new ISO3166)->name($country),
            CountryFormat::ALPHA_2 => (new ISO3166)->alpha2($country),
            CountryFormat::ALPHA_3 => (new ISO3166)->alpha3($country),
            CountryFormat::NUMERIC => (new ISO3166)->numeric($country),
        };
    } catch (\Exception $e) {
        return null;
    }
}

A pretty sweet improvement if you ask me. Thanks Taylor Otwell!

Now that you know about rescue, I expect you’ll be using it all over the place like me. Enjoy!