Appropriate inline try catch

Question

In Javascript (or for the most part, ECMAscript in general), which is the most appropriate way to write this?

try { ajax.abort() } catch(e) { console.error (e) }

or

try { ajax.abort(); } catch(e) { console.error (e); }

It seems like semi-colons are unneeded for this situation but at the same time I normally write this on 5 lines instead of one in which case I used semicolons for their standard programmatic purpose (eol).

Both work, and I'm sure both will validate, so which is semantically correct?

Answer 1

Here's an inline try-catch for expressions. You can compute a value in one go, but still catch exceptions and fall back to a default value when evaluation fails - similar in spirit to the ternary ?: operator:

function trycatch(func, fail) {
    try { return func() }
    catch(e) { return fail }
}

The expression must be wrapped up in a function, so it gets executed inside trycatch() not outside of it. Example use:

let value = trycatch(() => JSON.parse("parsing fails on this input"), null)