Can I catch multiple Java exceptions in the same catch clause?

Question

In Java, I want to do something like this:

try {
    ...     
} catch (IllegalArgumentException, SecurityException, 
       IllegalAccessException, NoSuchFieldException e) {
   someCode();
}

...instead of:

try {
    ...     
} catch (IllegalArgumentException e) {
    someCode();
} catch (SecurityException e) {
    someCode();
} catch (IllegalAccessException e) {
    someCode();
} catch (NoSuchFieldException e) {
    someCode();
}

Is there any way to do this?

Answer 1

No, one per customer.

You can catch a superclass, like java.lang.Exception, as long as you take the same action in all cases.

But that might not be the best practice. You should only catch an exception when you have a strategy for actually handling it - and logging and rethrowing is not "handling it". If you don't have a corrective action, best to add it to the method signature and let it bubble up to someone that can handle the situation.

Answer 2

Catch the exception that happens to be a parent class in the exception hierarchy. This is of course, bad practice. In your case, the common parent exception happens to be the Exception class, and catching any exception that is an instance of Exception, is indeed bad practice - exceptions like NullPointerException are usually programming errors and should usually be resolved by checking for null values.

Answer 3

No.

That is proposed for the next version of Java, but currently that's not possible.

If all the exceptions belong to the same class hierarchy, you can catch that, otherwise you'll have to catch them all.

Answer 4

If there is a hierarchy of exceptions you can use the base class to catch all subclasses of exceptions. In the degenerate case you can catch all Java exceptions with:

try {
   ...
} catch (Exception e) {
   someCode();
}

In a more common case if RepositoryException is the the base class and PathNotFoundException is a derived class then:

try {
   ...
} catch (RepositoryException re) {
   someCode();
} catch (Exception e) {
   someCode();
}

The above code will catch RepositoryException and PathNotFoundException for one kind of exception handling and all other exceptions are lumped together.

Answer 5

Within Java 7 u will be able to define multiple catch clauses like:

catch (IllegalArgumentException | SecurityException e)
{
    ...
}