Exceptions

The try/catch statement in Java handles special conditions called exceptions. An exception is a message that is sent, normally in response to an error, during the execution of a statement or a method. When an exceptional condition arises, an object is created that contains information about the particular problem or condition. Exceptions act somewhat like events. Java stops execution at the place where the exception occurred, and the exception object is said to be thrown by that section of code. Like an event, an exception must be delivered somewhere and handled. The section of code that receives the exception object is said to catch the exception. An exception causes the execution of the instigating section of code to stop abruptly and transfers control to the code that receives the exception object. The try/catch construct allows you to catch exceptions for a section of code. If an exception is caused by any statement inside a try clause, Java attempts to deliver the exception to the appropriate catch clause. A catch clause looks like a method declaration with one argument and no return type.

 try {  
 ...  
 } catch ( SomeExceptionType e ) {  
 ...  
 }  

If Java finds a catch clause with an argument type that matches the type of the exception, that catch clause is invoked. A try clause can have multiple catch clauses with different argument types; Java chooses the appropriate one in a way that is analogous to the selection of overloaded methods. You can catch multiple types of exceptions from a block of code. Depending on the type of exception thrown, the appropriate catch clause is executed. If there is no try/catch clause surrounding the code, or a matching catch clause is not found, the exception is thrown up to the calling method. If the exception is not caught there, it’s thrown up to another level, and so on until the exception is handled or the Java VM prints an error and exits. This provides a very flexible error-handling mechanism so that exceptions in deeply nested calls can bubble up to the surface of the call stack for handling. As a programmer, you need to know what exceptions a particular statement can generate. For this reason, methods in Java are required to declare the exceptions they can throw. If a method doesn’t handle an exception itself, it must specify that it can throw that exception so that its calling method knows that it may have to handle itWe will have a complete discussion of exceptions and the try/catch clause. Why do we need a try/catch clause in the run() method? What kind of exception can Thread’s sleep() method throw, and why do we care about it when we don’t seem to check for exceptions anywhere else? Under some circumstances, Thread’s sleep() method can throw an InterruptedException, indicating that it was interrupted by another thread. Since the run() method specified in the Runnable interface doesn’t declare that it can throw an InterruptedException, we must catch it ourselves, or else the compiler will complain. The try/catch statement in our example has an empty catch clause, which means that it handles the exception by ignoring it. In this case, our thread’s functionality is so simple that it doesn’t matter if it’s interrupted (and it won’t be anyway). All the other methods we have used either handle their own exceptions or throw only general-purpose exceptions called RuntimeExceptions that are assumed to be possible everywhere and don’t need to be explicitly declared.