Suppress error message in R

Question

I am running a simulation study in R. Occassionally, my simulation study produces an error message. As I implemented my simulation study in a function, the simulation stops when this error message occurs. I know that it is bad practice to suppress errors, but at this moment to me there is no other option than to suppress the error and then go on with the next simulation until the total number of simulations I like to run. To do this, I have to suppress the error message R produces.

To do this, I tried different things:

library(base64)
suppressWarnings
suppressMessages
options(error = expression(NULL))

In the first two options, only warnings and message are suprressed, so that's no help. If I understand it correctly, in the last case, all error messages should be avoided. However, that does not help, the function still stops with an error message.

Has someone any idea why this does not work the way I expect it to work? I searched the internet for solutions, but could only find the above mentioned ways. In the function I am running my simulation, a part of the code is analysed by the external program JAGS (Gibbs sampler) and the error message is produced by this analysis. Might this be where it goes wrong?

Note that I do not have to supress a certain/specific error message, as there are no other error messages produced, it is 'good enough' to have an option that supresses just all error messages.

Thanks for your time and help!

Answer 1

As suggested by the previous solution, you can use try or tryCatch functions, which will encapsulate the error (more info in Advanced R). However, they will not suppress the error reporting message to stderr by default.

This can be achieved by setting their parameters. For try, set silent=TRUE. For tryCatch set error=function(e){}.

Examples:

o <- try(1 + "a")
>  Error in 1 + "a" : non-numeric argument to binary operator
o <- try(1 + "a", silent=TRUE)  # no error printed

o <- tryCatch(1 + "a")
> Error in 1 + "a" : non-numeric argument to binary operator
o <- tryCatch(1 + "a", error=function(e){})