Catching access violation exceptions?

Question

Read it and weep!

I figured it out. If you don't throw from the handler, the handler will just continue and so will the exception.

The magic happens when you throw you own exception and handle that.

#include "stdafx.h"
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <signal.h>
#include <tchar.h>

void SignalHandler(int signal)
{
    printf("Signal %d",signal);
    throw "!Access Violation!";
}

int main()
{
    typedef void (*SignalHandlerPointer)(int);

    SignalHandlerPointer previousHandler;
    previousHandler = signal(SIGSEGV , SignalHandler);
    try{
        *(int *) 0 = 0;// Baaaaaaad thing that should never be caught. You should write good code in the first place.
    }
    catch(char *e)
    {
        printf("Exception Caught: %s\n",e);
    }
    printf("Now we continue, unhindered, like the abomination never happened. (I am an EVIL genius)\n");
    printf("But please kids, DONT TRY THIS AT HOME ;)\n");

}

There is a very easy way to catch any kind of exception (division by zero, access violation, etc.) in Visual Studio using try -> catch (...) block. A minor project settings tweaking is enough. Just enable /EHa option in the project settings. See Project Properties -> C/C++ -> Code Generation -> Modify the Enable C++ Exceptions to "Yes With SEH Exceptions". That's it!

See details here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/cpp/structured-exception-handling-c-cpp?view=msvc-160

Nope. C++ does not throw an exception when you do something bad, that would incur a performance hit. Things like access violations or division by zero errors are more like "machine" exceptions, rather than language-level things that you can catch.

At least for me, the signal(SIGSEGV ...) approach mentioned in another answer did not work on Win32 with Visual C++ 2015. What did work for me was to use _set_se_translator() found in eh.h. It works like this:

Step 1) Make sure you enable Yes with SEH Exceptions (/EHa) in Project Properties / C++ / Code Generation / Enable C++ Exceptions, as mentioned in the answer by Volodymyr Frytskyy.

Step 2) Call _set_se_translator(), passing in a function pointer (or lambda) for the new exception translator. It is called a translator because it basically just takes the low-level exception and re-throws it as something easier to catch, such as std::exception:

#include <string>
#include <eh.h>

// Be sure to enable "Yes with SEH Exceptions (/EHa)" in C++ / Code Generation;
_set_se_translator([](unsigned int u, EXCEPTION_POINTERS *pExp) {
    std::string error = "SE Exception: ";
    switch (u) {
    case 0xC0000005:
        error += "Access Violation";
        break;
    default:
        char result[11];
        sprintf_s(result, 11, "0x%08X", u);
        error += result;
    };
    throw std::exception(error.c_str());
});

Step 3) Catch the exception like you normally would:

try{
    MakeAnException();
}
catch(std::exception ex){
    HandleIt();
};