Can you change get-url and related functions so that instead of returning a string containing "ERR: ..." on an error, just throw an error that can be caught, similar to what is done with invalid list references?
As it is right now, I came across two different errors last night when running a site-scraper, but I don't feel comfortable with checking the output for a specific error string. 1) what if the file I'm fetching contains that error string? 2) I don't know in advance what all the possible error strings are. I came across two last night (connected failed, and server refused connection). How many more are there? What if hostname lookup failed?
newLISP distinguishes between errors caused by programming errors through wrong syntax or parameter choice versus
> (net-error)
nil
> (get-url "http://blahblah")
"ERR: could not connect"
> (net-error)
(2 "ERR: Host name not known")
>
Another advantage is, that you still get a meaningfull output from 'get-url' without error handling. Similar to a web browser displaying a 404 page.
Thank you, I hadn't used the net-error or sys-error functions before. Will start doing so now.