One of the most frustrating experiences when running a Java program is an empty line where you expect information about a thrown exception. The programmer probably meant to catch the exception but did nothing with it. As a result, when the exception is thrown at run time, there is no way to indicate to the user that it was thrown, which leads to erroneous results. For example, consider a method called method1 that throws an exception.
1. private void method1 () throws Exception {2. // Do stuff3. throw new Exception();4. }
Now consider this code:
1. System.out.println("Start");2. 3. try {4. method1();5. }6. catch (Exception e) {7. // EMPTY EXCEPTION HANDLER8. }9. System.out.println("End OK");
You catch the exception on Line 6. However, the program does nothing with the exception. The result is that at run time, there is no trace of the exception; it becomes nonexistent. The output of the code excerpt is:
StartEnd OK
Therefore, you should avoid empty exception handlers as good programming practice.