Trying to get property of non-object throws exception that cannot be handled

Question

In a custom Drupal 8 module I decided to wrap a line of code in a try...catch block, in case $node was null.

I understand that in php errors and exceptions are different, and according to Error message - Trying to get property of non-object this is an error, so will not be handled by try...catch, and the code should continue to run after the error.

However when this code runs under Drupal 8 the error hander raises an exception. So I added the try...catch block. But the exception is still unhandled crashed the program.

This is a cut-down version of my code:

$node = null;
try {
  // The next line results in an unhandled exception 
  $f = $node->field_example;
} catch (Exception $e) {
  // Never gets here
  watchdog_exception('example', $e);
}
// Never gets here

Am I missing something? Surely this can't be the intended behaviour?

Answer 1

I actually over-simplified by question. The crash doesn't happen in the simple case I posted, just an error and execution continues. It arises when I use field API syntax to refer to a null referenced entity, and only then when the target_id is not null.

$node->field_foo->target_id = 999; // term 999 does not exist
try {
  // The next line results in an unhandled exception 
  $v = $node->field_foo->entity->field_bar->value;
} catch (\Exception $e) {
  // Never gets here
  watchdog_exception('example', $e);
}
// And never gets to continue here

The issue was why and Drupal does this. The solution (thanks @Clive) is to replace catch (\Exception $e) with catch (\Throwable $e)

Answer 2

You are trying to catch Exception, when you should be catching \Exception.

} catch (\Exception $e) {

EDIT: Assuming that an exception is actually thrown as stated in the original post.