Exception thrown inside catch block - will it be caught again?

Question

This may seem like a programming 101 question and I had thought I knew the answer but now find myself needing to double check. In this piece of code below, will the exception thrown in the first catch block then be caught by the general Exception catch block below?

try {
  // Do something
} catch(IOException e) {
  throw new ApplicationException("Problem connecting to server");
} catch(Exception e) {
  // Will the ApplicationException be caught here?
}

I always thought the answer would be no, but now I have some odd behaviour that could be caused by this. The answer is probably the same for most languages but I'm working in Java.

Answer 1

No, since the new throw is not in the try block directly.

Answer 2

No -- As Chris Jester-Young said, it will be thrown up to the next try-catch in the hierarchy.

Answer 3

As said above...
I would add that if you have trouble seeing what is going on, if you can't reproduce the issue in the debugger, you can add a trace before re-throwing the new exception (with the good old System.out.println at worse, with a good log system like log4j otherwise).

Answer 4

No. It's very easy to check.

public class Catch {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        try {
            throw new java.io.IOException();
        } catch (java.io.IOException exc) {
            System.err.println("In catch IOException: "+exc.getClass());
            throw new RuntimeException();
        } catch (Exception exc) {
            System.err.println("In catch Exception: "+exc.getClass());
        } finally {
            System.err.println("In finally");
        }
    }
}

Should print:

In catch IOException: class java.io.IOException
In finally
Exception in thread "main" java.lang.RuntimeException
        at Catch.main(Catch.java:8)

Technically that could have been a compiler bug, implementation dependent, unspeicifed behaviour, or something. However, the JLS is pretty well nailed down and the compilers could enough for these sort of simple things (generics corner case may be a different matter).

Alos note, if you swap around the two catch blocks, it wont compile. The second catch would be completely unreachable.

Note finally is always called even if a catch is executed. (other than silly cases, such as infinite loops, attaching through the tools interface and killing the thread, rewriting bytecode, etc.).

Answer 5

It won't be caught by the second catch block. Each Exception is caught only when inside a try block. You can nest tries though (not that it's a good idea generally):

try {
    doSomething();
} catch (IOException) {
   try {
       doSomething();
   } catch (IOException e) {
       throw new ApplicationException("Failed twice at doSomething" +
       e.toString());
   }          
} catch (Exception e) {
}

Answer 6

No, since the catches all refer to the same try block, so throwing from within a catch block would be caught by an enclosing try block (probably in the method that called this one)

Answer 7

The Java Language Specification says in section 14.19.1:

If execution of the try block completes abruptly because of a throw of a value V, then there is a choice:

• If the run-time type of V is assignable to the Parameter of any catch clause of the try statement, then the first (leftmost) such catch clause is selected. The value V is assigned to the parameter of the selected catch clause, and the Block of that catch clause is executed. If that block completes normally, then the try statement completes normally; if that block completes abruptly for any reason, then the try statement completes abruptly for the same reason.

Reference: http://java.sun.com/docs/books/jls/second_edition/html/statements.doc.html#24134

In other words, the first enclosing catch that can handle the exception does, and if an exception is thrown out of that catch, that's not in the scope of any other catch for the original try, so they will not try to handle it.

One related and confusing thing to know is that in a try-[catch]-finally structure, a finally block may throw an exception and if so, any exception thrown by the try or catch block is lost. That can be confusing the first time you see it.

Answer 8

Not being overly critical but this is the type of question that can easily be answered by experimentation. Experimentation is as critical to being a good programmer as asking questions is.