Standard exceptions In C++

[VelMurugan]

Standard exceptions

The C++ Standard library provides a base class specifically designed to declare objects to be thrown as exceptions. It is called exception and is defined in the <exception> header file under the namespace std. This class has the usual default and copy constructors, operators and destructors, plus an additional virtual member function called what that returns a null-terminated character sequence (char *) and that can be overwritten in derived classes to contain some sort of description of the exception.

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// standard exceptions
#include <iostream>
#include <exception>
using namespace std;

class myexception: public exception
{
  virtual const char* what() const throw()
  {
    return "My exception happened";
  }
} myex;

int main () {
  try
  {
    throw myex;
  }
  catch (exception& e)
  {
    cout << e.what() << endl;
  }
  return 0;
}
   

My exception happened.

We have placed a handler that catches exception objects by reference (notice the ampersand & after the type), therefore this catches also classes derived from exception, like our myex object of class myexception.

All exceptions thrown by components of the C++ Standard library throw exceptions derived from this std::exception class. These are:

exception   description
bad_alloc   thrown by new on allocation failure
bad_cast   thrown by dynamic_cast when fails with a referenced type
bad_exception   thrown when an exception type doesn't match any catch
bad_typeid   thrown by typeid
ios_base::failure   thrown by functions in the iostream library

For example, if we use the operator new and the memory cannot be allocated, an exception of type bad_alloc is thrown:

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try
{
  int * myarray= new int[1000];
}
catch (bad_alloc&)
{
  cout << "Error allocating memory." << endl;
}

It is recommended to include all dynamic memory allocations within a try block that catches this type of exception to perform a clean action instead of an abnormal program termination, which is what happens when this type of exception is thrown and not caught. If you want to force a bad_alloc exception to see it in action, you can try to allocate a huge array; On my system, trying to allocate 1 billion ints threw a bad_alloc exception.

Because bad_alloc is derived from the standard base class exception, we can handle that same exception by catching references to the exception class:

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// bad_alloc standard exception
#include <iostream>
#include <exception>
using namespace std;

int main () {
  try
  {
    int* myarray= new int[1000];
  }
  catch (exception& e)
  {
    cout << "Standard exception: " << e.what() << endl;
  }
  return 0;
}


Source : cplus