Question

I have a design level doubt regarding creating APIs in Java. Suppose I have a class as follows :-

class Test
{
  public final static String DEFAULT_ENCODING = "utf-8";

  public byte[] encodeIt(String input)
  {
    try {
      return input.getBytes(DEFAULT_ENCODING);
    } catch(UnsupportedEncodingException e) {
      // do something
    }
  }
}

I know that the UnsupportedEncodingException would never arise as I’m using a static string as the input to toBytes. It doesn’t make sense to have encodeIt do a throws UnsupportedEncodingException because I dont wish the API users to expect and catch that error either.

In such cases, is the best practice to have an empty catch block?

Answer 1

It is a bad idea to have empty catch blocks. Even though your reasoning seems correct this design will at some stage cause you endless debugging and searching once exceptions do start happening and your code is swallowing them. I would wrap your exception in a RuntimeException here and throw that. Like so:

public encodeIt(String input)
  {
    try {
      return input.getBytes(DEFAULT_ENCODING);
    catch(UnsupportedEncodingException e) {
      throw new RuntimeException(e);
    }
  }

This way your exception will not stay hidden might it occur nor do your API users have to cater for it.