It is not ‘raising’ an error, so rescue will not handle it. It is ‘throwing’ an :exit, so you need to catch it like:

iex> try do
...>   exit "I am exiting"
...> catch
...>   :exit, _ -> "not really"
...> end
"not really"

And that is the only way to handle an exit in that context (without looking at xmerl itself, if it is another process then trapping exits would work too).

EDIT: Or more accurately for your use case:

iex(2)> try do
...(2)>  :xmerl_scan.string '<xml>'
...(2)> catch
...(2)>  :exit, e -> {:nope, e}
...(2)> end
[error] 4108- fatal: :unexpected_end

{:nope,
 {:fatal,
  {:unexpected_end, {:file, :file_name_unknown}, {:line, 1}, {:col, 6}}}}

Greetings,

Actually there is event simpler solution(s).

1. xmerl_scan has quiet ({quiet, Flag}) as one of the options. When set to true xmerl behaves and nothing get’s error-logged. Details are here: http://erlang.org/doc/man/xmerl_scan.html

2. I was experiencing same issue with false error reporting as @jaimeiniesta. And that’s Elixir Logger capturing erlang’s standard_error and logs it with error level to configured Logger backends. See :handle_otp_reports config option of the Elixir.Logger

3. Solution with wrapping xmerl parsing in a separate process and setting group leader to stub GenServer didn’t work for me. But good implementation example could be found in ExUnit Capture logs/io sources: https://github.com/elixir-lang/elixir/blob/master/lib/ex_unit/lib/ex_unit/capture_io.ex

Cheers

For the record, SweetXml allows passing options to xmerl when parsing:

https://hexdocs.pm/sweet_xml/SweetXml.html#parse/2

SweetXml.parse(doc, quiet: true)

Thanks @OvermindDL1 - that’s what I’m doing, catching the :exit, but I also see the [error] 4108- fatal: :unexpected_end line, I thought an error was being raised and I was unable to catch it.

But, what I think it’s happening here is that the error just gets logged, no error is raised. Does that make sense?

Actually that [error] part is a logged message from xmerl, not even really an error message, not a thrown anything, just a bit of noise from an old erlang module. You could silence it by hooking its output if you really want.