Question

I am writing the constructor for my “main” class. The first thing it does is call a method to use commons-cli to parse the command line. If the parseOptions method returns false, an error has occurred, and the constructor should exit.

I tried writing the following code

if (!parseOptions(args)) return

but the compiler complains that I have a “Return statement outside method definition”.

Short of calling System.exit(1) or inverting the boolean (and putting all of the rest of my logic inside the if statement, is there any way to return “early” from a constructor?

I suppose I could have the parseOptions method throw an IllegalArgumentException and catch that in my Main object.

Thanks.

Answer 1

is there any way to return “early” from a constructor

No. But in your case it sounds like bad design, anyway.

If the parseOptions method returns false, an error has occurred

In this case the constructor should throw an exception, not return normally.