“Try” and “can” functions

This Go package contains two cty functions intended for use in an hcl.EvalContext when evaluating HCL native syntax expressions.

The first function try attempts to evaluate each of its argument expressions in order until one produces a result without any errors.

try(non_existent_variable, 2) # returns 2

If none of the expressions succeed, the function call fails with all of the errors it encountered.

The second function can is similar except that it ignores the result of the given expression altogether and simply returns true if the expression produced a successful result or false if it produced errors.

Both of these are primarily intended for working with deep data structures which might not have a dependable shape. For example, we can use try to attempt to fetch a value from deep inside a data structure but produce a default value if any step of the traversal fails:

result = try(foo.deep[0].lots.of["traversals"], null)

The final result to try should generally be some sort of constant value that will always evaluate successfully.

Using these functions

Languages built on HCL can make try and can available to user code by exporting them in the hcl.EvalContext used for expression evaluation:

ctx := &hcl.EvalContext{
    Functions: map[string]function.Function{
        "try": tryfunc.TryFunc,
        "can": tryfunc.CanFunc,
    },
}