Window: error event

Baseline Widely available

This feature is well established and works across many devices and browser versions. It’s been available across browsers since July 2015.

The error event is fired on a Window object when a resource failed to load or couldn't be used — for example if a script has an execution error.

Syntax

Use the event name in methods like addEventListener(), or set an event handler property.

addEventListener("error", (event) => {});

onerror = (message, source, lineno, colno, error) => {};

Note: For historical reasons, onerror on Window and WorkerGlobalScope objects is the only event handler property that receives more than one argument.

Event type

The event object is a ErrorEvent instance if it was generated from a user interface element, or an Event instance otherwise.

Description

Event handler property

For historical reasons, the onerror event handler property, on Window and WorkerGlobalScope objects only, has different behavior from other event handler properties.

Note that this only applies to handlers assigned to onerror, not to handlers added using addEventListener().

Cancellation

Most event handlers assigned to event handler properties can cancel the event's default behavior by returning false from the handler:

textarea.onkeydown = () => false;

However, for an event handler property to cancel the default behavior of the error event of Window, it must instead return true:

window.onerror = () => true;

When canceled, the error won't appear in the console, but the current script will still stop executing.

Arguments

The event handler's signature is asymmetric between addEventListener() and onerror. The event handler passed to Window.addEventListener() receives a single ErrorEvent object, while the onerror handler receives five arguments, matching the ErrorEvent object's properties:

message: A string containing a human-readable error message describing the problem. Same as ErrorEvent.message.

Note: In HTML, the content event handler attribute onerror on the <body> element attaches error event listeners to window (not the <body> element). For this event handler, the first parameter is called event, not message, although it still contains a string; that is, you would use <body onerror="console.error(event)"> to log the error message.
source: A string containing the URL of the script that generated the error.
lineno: An integer containing the line number of the script file on which the error occurred.
colno: An integer containing the column number of the script file on which the error occurred.
error: The error being thrown. Usually an Error object.

window.onerror = (a, b, c, d, e) => {
  console.log(`message: ${a}`);
  console.log(`source: ${b}`);
  console.log(`lineno: ${c}`);
  console.log(`colno: ${d}`);
  console.log(`error: ${e}`);

  return true;
};

Note: These parameter names are observable with an HTML event handler attribute, where the first parameter is called event instead of message.

This special behavior only happens for the onerror event handler on window. The Element.onerror handler still receives a single ErrorEvent object.

Examples

Live example

HTML

html

<div class="controls">
  <button id="script-error" type="button">Generate script error</button>
  <img class="bad-img" />
</div>

<div class="event-log">
  <label for="eventLog">Event log:</label>
  <textarea
    readonly
    class="event-log-contents"
    rows="8"
    cols="30"
    id="eventLog"></textarea>
</div>

body {
  display: grid;
  grid-template-areas: "control log";
}

.controls {
  grid-area: control;
  display: flex;
  align-items: center;
  justify-content: center;
}

.event-log {
  grid-area: log;
}

.event-log-contents {
  resize: none;
}

label,
button {
  display: block;
}

button {
  height: 2rem;
  margin: 0.5rem;
}

img {
  width: 0;
  height: 0;
}

JavaScript

const log = document.querySelector(".event-log-contents");

window.addEventListener("error", (event) => {
  log.textContent = `${log.textContent}${event.type}: ${event.message}\n`;
  console.log(event);
});

const scriptError = document.querySelector("#script-error");
scriptError.addEventListener("click", () => {
  const badCode = "const s;";
  eval(badCode);
});

Result

Specifications

Specification
HTML Standard # event-error
HTML Standard # handler-onerror

Browser compatibility

BCD tables only load in the browser