Question

I am using a buffered writer and my code, closes the writer in the finally block. My code is like this.

 ...........
    BufferedWriter theBufferedWriter = null;
    try{
    theBufferedWriter =.....
    ....
    ......
    .....
    } catch (IOException anException) {
    ....
    } finally {
        try {
            theBufferedWriter.close();              
        } catch (IOException anException) {
            anException.printStackTrace();
            }
    }

I have to use the try catch inside the clean up code in finally as theBufferedWriter might also throw an IOException. I do not want to throw this exception to the calling methos. Is it a good practice to use a try catch in finally? If not what is the alternative? Please suggest.

Regards,
Hiral

Answer 1

A somewhat nicer way to do this is to use IOUtils.closeQuiety from Apache commons-io. It keeps your code tidy and eliminates some of the boilerplate that’s inherent in Java.

You code then becomes:

BufferedWriter theBufferedWriter = null;
try{
    theBufferedWriter = ...
    ...
} catch (IOException anException) {
    ...
} finally {
    IOUtils.closeQuietly(theBufferedWriter);
}

Much nicer and more expressive.