If catching null pointer exception is not a good practice, is catching exception a good one?

Question

I have heard that catching NullPointerException is a bad practice, and i think it is sensibly so. Letting the NullPointerException to propagate to

Answer 1

Pokemon exception-handling is bad. Especially, if it's an empty block and you're simply swallowing them. You have specifically-typed exceptions for the reason that they actually mean specific things in specific contexts (essentially they're telling you what went wrong). So by catching Exception you're saying that you don't care what those exceptions are and that you don't care what happened. This is probably not what you want.

In general, when catching exceptions follow these rules:

• Does it make sense to handle the exception at this level? If yes, then handle it. If not, then propagate.
• In conjunction with the first rule, "handling" can also mean, catching, wrapping, and re-throwing. This is a way of preventing abstraction-leakage so that callers of your method don't have to know about the underlying implementation.
• An empty catch block doesn't mean that you've handled the exception. That's called "swallowing"; at the very least, you want to log the exception. Sometimes an exception happening is actually part of the logical flow of your code, and so you might want to do something special (but this is, pardon the pun, the exception rather than the rule. It is better to check for situations that cause exceptions rather than incorporating them into the logical flow of your code).

You can easily check for a null value in your code, so there is no need to explicitly catch a null-pointer exception. It doesn't make sense to let a NullPointerException happen (and it's bad practice). Even if you have some code that throws a NullPointerException, and it is code that you do not control and cannot fix, you should determine the input parameters that cause the NullPointerException and specifically test for them.

Another exception that you shouldn't catch is the IllegalArgumentException. This exception means that you've passed in an argument that does not make sense. Instead of catching this exception, you should explicitly test your input parameters to ensure that they are sane and that they cannot cause an IllegalArgumentException.

Answer 2

The 'reason' that catching NullPointerException is considered a bad practice is not because you're supposed to let it bubble up when something goes wrong! Saying any exception is 'best left unhandled' based solely on its type seems like a bad idea.

A NPE is considered the result of a programming error. A strictly correct program should never generate one. The reason seeing it caught is bad is it usually means that the code threw one, and the programmer decided to just catch it and cover it up, rather than fix the broken code that caused it in the first place!

If, for example, you were coupled for business reasons to an API that has a bug inside and occassionally throws a null pointer, it would be perfectly legitimate to catch it, do something about it/inform the user with a better message. Letting 'null' hit the UI just because someone said "Catching Null Pointer Exception is bad" would make no sense!

Catching java.lang.Exception can be legitimate in specific cases, but generally "I'm lazy" is not one of them. :) For example if you're implementing an API and want to make absolutely sure no exception ever comes out of it that isn't in the specification, you might catch Exception and wrap it in some application exception you've defined.

Answer 3

The main rule about catching exception is that you have to know why you are doing this. Exception class is caught in cases when programmer wants to do generic error processing and he does not really care what exactly happened, the main thing is just something went wrong. In that case he may decide to rollback transaction or do some cleanup. If you are catching specific exception try to apply the same rule. I you know exactly why you are doing that, then it's to do that. But it's very rare case when someone would want to do something really special in case of NPE.

Answer 4

if you have a graceful way to handle your exception it is useful to catch it, if not hope that the caller has a nice way to handle it.

Answer 5

In general, the only times you should catch an exception is if you can handle it in some meaningful way. If you can't you should simply let it bubble to the top and terminate the process. For instance, could you recover in some meaningful way from a NullPointerException or I/O error? I think not.

My rules for exception handling:

• In general, don't catch exceptions, unless you can handle them in some meaningful way.
• Catch exceptions at process/machine boundaries, log the caught exception along with any context available to you and re-throw it. If the exception is a custom exception, you may wrap it in an exception of a type known/useful to the invoking process and throw that.
• You may also catch exceptions at a low level, where you have the most runtime context available, log the exception and associated context, then rethrow the exception.
• When rethrowing, use throw ; rather than throw caughtException ;. Use of the former syntax preserves the original stack trace; use of the latter syntax creates a new stack trace, beginning with throw caughtException ; -- you lose all the context and call stack up to the point at which the exception was caught.
• You may, if you so choose, catch exceptions at a high level and gracefully terminate the process, logging the exception information so as to help debug and correct the underlying problem.

Do not use exceptions as a flow control mechanism (if possible). Exceptions are supposed to be, well, exceptional in nature. Rather, premptively, enforce the caller's end of the contract (preconditions) for any methods you are invoking.

See Bertrand Meyers' book , Object Oriented Software Construction, 2nd ed. for more information.

Answer 6

You should only catch an Exception if you can add some value by doing so. Otherwise you should let it pass to the caller.

NullPointerException is usually the result of a bug in your code. How can you sensibly fix this in a catch block?

Not being bothered about Exceptions is not good practice.