Foundry/Anvil Error Handling

[PhilippLgh]

Describe the Feature

Hey @ricmoo 👋

Was using foundry's anvil as drop-in replacement for hardhat node today and realised it had issues with error parsing.
Turns out ethers is doing some regex string matching message.match(/gas required exceeds allowance.../) on
"gas required exceeds allowance:" but anvil would throw with "required gas exceeds allowance:".

It seems hardhat had some issues with this in the past as well and a lack of standards causes these problems and requires to come up with string matching patches. The current solution to rephrase the message seems to be a hotfix if anything and is not really stable or localisation friendly. So maybe it helps to discuss and have a compatible format early on to avoid problems down the road.

Here is the anvil PR: foundry-rs/foundry#4391

Code Example

No response

[ricmoo]

I would love a standard for errors and is something I bring up all the time when new projects that might be able to fix it come up, but unfortunately I don’t think any of those standard steering projects receive sufficient funding, because I seldom here of them again. :(

We used to have monthly calls with and RPC steering committee, but haven’t heard from them in a while either (if you are out there reading this, please chime in ;)).

If there are new strings to accept, that is something I’d like to roll into ethers, as ethers attempts to coalesce errors into machine-readable and human-readable errors.

Are you currently using v5 or v6? I’ve tried to simplify and be more precise the logic in v6, since string matching in the face of custom errors has added a whole new challenge.

I’m going to move this to the “Ideas Discussion” and would definitely like to continue discussing. ;)

[PhilippLgh]

I'm using hardhat 2.12.7 + v5.
Referenced this on the other issue before someone writes a regex for "required gas exceeds allowance:" and now their code is breaking 🙈

[ricmoo]

Yeah. It’s a pain. I have to constantly update the regex logic… I’ve tried making the v6 code base easier to extend, so if there is a weird backend, a custom provider sub-class has the opportunity to override how errors are parsed. My hope is things like a HardhatProvider can add their own logic to decouple any changes they have added to the error messages, for example.

For example, Etherscan which has myriad tweaks to the error messages and format overall gets to handle those.