How do I disable error messages when a substitution fails inside a Vim function?

Question

I have a dead simple function in Vim that cleans source code by calling :retab and removing trailing whitespace, like so:

:function CodeClean()
:  retab
:  %s/\s\+$//
:endfunction

If my source code has no trailing whitespace, I get the following error messages:

Error detected while processing function CodeClean:
line    2:
E486: Pattern not found: \s\+$

So for my purposes, I either need to tell the substitution command that match errors should be silent, or tell the function invocation to ignore errors, or something else. How do I surpress error messages on substitution failure?

Answer 1

You can try add the 'e' option to the substitute or use :silent! as a prefix to any command

:%s/\s\+$//e
:silent! %s/\s\+$//  

Notice:

You'll need to use :silent!, as :silent only removes normal messages (and only up to the first error, subsequent messages will all be shown)---comment of @Marth, Thanks!