How to Catch Panics in Rust with catch_unwind

Wrap the code that might panic in std::panic::catch_unwind, passing a closure that returns a Result to capture the panic payload. This function returns Ok with the closure's result if no panic occurs, or Err with the panic payload if it does.

use std::panic;

fn main() {
    let result: Result<(), &str> = panic::catch_unwind(|| {
        // Code that might panic
        panic!("Something went wrong");
    });

    match result {
        Ok(_) => println!("No panic occurred"),
        Err(payload) => println!("Caught a panic: {:?}", payload),
    }
}

Note: The closure passed to catch_unwind must return a type that implements Send + 'static. If you need to catch panics from non-Send types, use catch_unwind(AssertUnwindSafe(...)).

Think of catch_unwind as a safety net for your code. If a function crashes (panics) inside the net, the program doesn't stop; instead, the crash is caught and handed to you as an error you can handle. You use this when you need to keep a program running even if a specific part of it fails unexpectedly.