Question

Parsing the string message seems bad. Or was this exception not meant to be caught?

java.io.IOException: Connection reset by peer
    at sun.nio.ch.FileDispatcher.read0(Native Method)
    at sun.nio.ch.SocketDispatcher.read(SocketDispatcher.java:21)

Answer 1

You need to catch the IOException and, yes, parse the string.

There isn’t any other exception more specific than that to be caught as far as I know.

Or catch SocketException and, again, parse the string.

Here‘s the class tree from javadoc (version 6). As you can see, SocketException is the most specialized exception to be thrown when the connection is reset.