Ruby Exceptions — Why “else”?

Question

I\'m trying to understand exceptions in Ruby but I\'m a little confused. The tutorial I\'m using says that if an exception occurs that does not match any of the exceptions iden

Answer 1

Thanks to else you sometimes can merge two nested begin end blocks.
So (simplified example from my current code) instead of:

  begin
    html = begin
      NetHTTPUtils.request_data url
    rescue NetHTTPUtils::Error => e
      raise unless 503 == e.code
      sleep 60
      retry
    end
    redo unless html["market"]
  end

you write:

  begin
    html = NetHTTPUtils.request_data url
  rescue NetHTTPUtils::Error => e
    raise unless 503 == e.code
    sleep 60
    retry
  else
    redo unless html["market"]
  end