3.7. EXCEPTIONS AND TRY..
CATCH 101
if the value of str is, say, "fred", the function call will fail because "fred" is not a legal
string representation of an int value. In this case, an exception of type NumberFormatException
occurs. If nothing is done to handle the exception, the program will crash.
An IllegalArgumentException can occur when an illegal value is passed as a parameter to a
subroutine. For example, if a subroutine requires that a parameter be greater than or equal to
zero, an IllegalArgumentException might occur when a negative value is passed to the subroutine.
How to respond to the illegal value is up to the person who wrote the subroutine, so we
can’t simply say that every illegal parameter value will result in an IllegalArgumentException.
However, it is a common response.
One case where an IllegalArgumentException can occur is in the valueOf function of an
enumerated type. Recall from Subsection 2.3.3 that this function tries to convert a string into
one of the values of the enumerated type. If the string that is passed as a parameter to valueOf
is not the name of one of the enumerated type’s values, then an IllegalArgumentException occurs.
For example, given the enumerated type
enum Toss { HEADS, TAILS }
Toss.valueOf("HEADS") correctly returns the value Toss.HEADS, while Toss.valueOf("FEET")
results in an IllegalArgumentException.
3.7.2 try..catch
When an exception occurs, we say that the exception is “thrown”. For example, we say that
Integer.parseInt(str) throws an exception of type NumberFormatException when the value
of str is illegal. When an exception is thrown, it is possible to “catch” the exception and
prevent it from crashing the program. This is done with a try..catch statement. In somewhat
simplified form, the syntax for a try..catch is:
try {
hstatements-1 i
}
catch ( hexception-class-name i hvariable-name i ) {
hstatements-2 i
}
The hexception-class-namei could be NumberFormatException, IllegalArgumentException, or
some other exception class. When the computer executes this statement, it executes the state-
ments in the try part. If no error occurs during the execution of hstatements-1 i, then the
computer just skips over the catch part and proceeds with the rest of the program. However,
if an exception of type hexception-class-namei occurs during the execution of hstatements-1 i,
the computer immediately jumps to the catch part and executes hstatements-2 i, skipping any
remaining statements in hstatements-1 i. During the execution of hstatements-2 i, the hvariable-
namei represents the exception object, so that you can, for example, print it out. At the end
of the catch part, the computer proceeds with the rest of the program; the exception has been
caught and handled and does not crash the program. Note that only one type of exception is
caught; if some other type of exception occurs during the execution of hstatements-1 i, it will
crash the program as usual.
(By the way, note that the braces, { and }, are part of the syntax of the try..catch
statement. They are required even if there is only one statement between the braces. This is
different from the other statements we have seen, where the braces around a single statement
are optional.)
