Golang错误和说明文件

Question

Unfortunately golang error documentation in the standard library is next to non-existent. e.g. just opening a file, the return values for the error are not documented except that you can print a string. But this is not always the right way to handle it.

Is there a way to determine what the real error code might be through trial and error rather than just printing out the text? It seems silly to match the whole text for the specific error.

e.g. given I want to ultimately achieve something like this (assuming it's right)

if fd, err := io.Open("filename"); err != nil {
  if err != io.ErrFileNotFound {
    log.Fatalf("Error opening file: %s", err)
  }
}

As far as I can tell anything that implements the error interface will be able to be used as an error. But determining what the error is is what I'm struggling with. The error may be a struct that has other fields in it like a number field to tell me what type of error it is aside from the text itself. But how would I know what other data the error contains short of looking through many source files and sometimes tens of function calls.

Does this make sense?

As a more practical example. I am using a yaml library to load a config file. If the config file doesn't exist I want to carry on (it'll use defaults). But if there is a permissions error I want the error to be treated as fatal. The problem is, it's not entirely clear what the error will look like ahead of time.

Answer 1

Use os.IsNotExist to check for file not found errors:

f, err := os.Open("filename")
if os.IsNotExist(err) {
  // handle missing file
} else if err != nil {
  // handle other errors
}

The functions os.IsExist, os.IsPermission and is.Timeout check for other common types of errors.

The os, io and other packages declare variables for specific errors.