Question

I am encountering an error when user doesn’t type anything into input statement. I thought of using Try/Catch blocks to instead throw exception to set boolAskRepeat to true which should skip to the end of the code and repeat the loop.

This doesn’t work, and I believe I’m missing something but I’m not sure what… It still throws exception saying:

Exception in thread "main" java.lang.StringIndexOutOfBoundsException: String index out of range: 0
    at java.lang.String.charAt(Unknown Source)
    at ITSLab03.main(ITSLab03.java:34)

Which is this line of code: inputStatus = input.readLine().toLowerCase().charAt(0);

What am I doing wrong here?

while (boolAskStatus == true)
{
    System.out.print("Employment Status (F or P): ");

    try 
    { 
        inputStatus = input.readLine().toLowerCase().charAt(0); 

        if (inputStatus == "f".charAt(0))
        {
            boolAskStatus = false;

            String stringCheckSalary = null;
            boolean boolCheckSalary = true;
            while (boolCheckSalary == true)
            {
                // some code
            }

            outputData(inputName, inputStatus, calculateFullTimePay(inputSalary));
        }
        else if (inputStatus == "p".charAt(0))
        {
            // some code                

            outputData(inputName, inputStatus, calculatePartTimePay(inputRate, inputHours));
        }
        else boolAskStatus = true;

    } 
    catch (IOException e) { boolAskStatus = true; }
}

Answer 1

You need to catch StringIndexOutOfBoundsException as well (If you observe the stack trace properly this is the exception you are getting)

  catch (StringIndexOutOfBoundsException e) {
            boolAskStatus = true;  
      }

(or)
catch Exception which catches all runtime exceptions

catch (Exception e) {
                boolAskStatus = true;  
          }