Ruby Exceptions Equality

Few days ago my colleague was stuck for a moment when testing one service object. The service object was responsible for a batch operation. Basically operating on multiple objects and collecting the status of the action. Either it was successful or failed with an exception. We couldn’t get our equality assertion to work even though at first glance everything looked ok. We had to dig deeper.

The problem boils down to exceptions equality in Ruby. And few tests in console showed precisely how it works, later to be confirmed by the documentation.

Let’s see a comparison case by case. But first, exception definition:

RefundNotAllowed = Class . new ( StandardError )

Does two instances of same exception equal?

RefundNotAllowed . new == RefundNotAllowed . new # => true

Yes. That was our first test and it behaved according to our intution. So why did our test fail if everything told us that we are comparing identical exceptions.

What about message?

RefundNotAllowed . new ( "one message" ) == RefundNotAllowed . new ( "another" ) # => false RefundNotAllowed . new ( "one message" ) == RefundNotAllowed . new ( "one message" ) # => true

Ok, so apparently the message must be identical as well. But in our case the message was equal and our exceptions were still non-equal. Bummer. Let’s think about one more aspect of exceptions: backtrace.

What about backtrace?

The backtrace of unthrown exception is…

RefundNotAllowed . new . backtrace => nil

Ok, I didn’t excepted that. I imagined that the backtrace is assigned at the moment of exception instantiation. But when you think deeper about it, you might realize that it wouldn’t make sense.

exception = RefundNotAllowed . new raise exception

Would you like to know that the exception was raised at line 1 or rather line 2 in that example? So obviously backtraces are assigned when exception is actually raised, not merly instantiated.

But do they play any role in exception equality? Let’s see.

def one_method raise RefundNotAllowed . new rescue => x return x end def another_method raise RefundNotAllowed . new rescue => x return x end one_method == one_method # => true another_method == another_method # => true one_method == another_method # => false exception_one = one_method exception_two = one_method exception_one == exception_two # => false

Apparently for two exceptions to be equal they must have identical backtrace. Even 1 line of difference makes them, well… , different.

What does the doc say?

ruby Exception#== documentation says: If obj is not an Exception, returns false. Otherwise, returns true if exc and obj share same class, messages, and backtrace.

In my original problem it lead me to realization that we were comparing raised-and-catched exception (thus with stacktrace) with a newly instantiated exception. That’s why we couldn’t get to make them equal.

When you use assert_raises(RefundNotAllowed) or expect{}.to raise_error(RefundNotAllowed) these matchers take care of the details for you:

But when you check something like expect(result.first.error).to eq(RefundNotAllowed.new) because your batch process collected them for you, then you are on your own and this might not be good enough and it won’t work. You might wanna just compare manually exception class and message.

What about custom exceptions with additional data?

Because they inherit from Exception (through StandardError ) they share identical logic as described in documentation.

class RefundNotAllowed < StandardError attr_reader :order_id def initialize ( order_id ) super ( "Refund not allowed" ) @order_id = order_id end end RefundNotAllowed . new ( 1 ) == RefundNotAllowed . new ( 2 ) # => true

If you want something better you need to overwrite == operator yourself.

class RefundNotAllowed < StandardError attr_reader :order_id def initialize ( order_id ) super ( "Refund not allowed" ) @order_id = order_id end def == ( obj ) super ( obj ) && order_id == obj . order_id end end RefundNotAllowed . new ( 1 ) == RefundNotAllowed . new ( 2 ) # false RefundNotAllowed . new ( 2 ) == RefundNotAllowed . new ( 2 ) # true

My opinion

I am personally not convinced about the usability of including backtrace in exception equality logic because in reality one would almost never create two exceptions with the exact same backtrace to compare them. Although maybe for some usecases it is a nice way to determine if repeated attempt failed in exactly same way and for the same reason.