Handling Errors

When scraping with Puppeteer, it’s essential to anticipate and handle errors that can occur during script execution. Errors can arise from various sources, such as timeouts, page crashes, or navigation issues. Proper error handling ensures the reliability of our scripts and helps identify and resolve issues efficiently. In this lesson, we’ll explore different techniques for handling errors in Puppeteer scripts.

Using try-catch for general errors

One of the fundamental error-handling techniques in JavaScript is using try-catch blocks. These blocks allow us to catch and handle general errors that might occur during script execution. This approach allows us to gracefully handle unexpected errors and prevent them from crashing our script.

Adding try-catch blocks is crucial not only in the scraping phase but also in scenarios such as exporting data to databases or files, as they enable graceful error handling. Moreover, incorporating try-catch blocks aids in troubleshooting by providing insights into failures when they occur.

Let’s explore this by adding an invalid URL to navigate and catching the error from the code snippet below. Here, we need to surround the code that we expect to throw an error within the try block and implement the error handling part within the catch block.