Question

So I’m building a program which takes ints from user input. I have what seems to be a very straightforward try/catch block which, if the user doesn’t enter an int, should repeat the block until they do. Here’s the relevant part of the code:

import java.util.InputMismatchException;
import java.util.Scanner;


public class Except {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        Scanner input = new Scanner(System.in);
        boolean bError = true;
        int n1 = 0, n2 = 0, nQuotient = 0;

        do {
            try {
                System.out.println("Enter first num: ");
                n1 = input.nextInt();
                System.out.println("Enter second num: ");
                n2 = input.nextInt();
                nQuotient = n1/n2;
                bError = false;
            } 
            catch (Exception e) {
                System.out.println("Error!");
            }
        } while (bError);

        System.out.printf("%d/%d = %d",n1,n2, nQuotient);
    }
}

If I enter a 0 for the second integer, then the try/catch does exactly what it’s supposed to and makes me put it in again. But, if I have an InputMismatchException like by entering 5.5 for one of the numbers, it just shows my error message in an infinite loop. Why is this happening, and what can I do about it? (By the way, I have tried explicitly typing InputMismatchException as the argument to catch, but it didn’t fix the problem.

Answer 1

You need to call next(); when you get the error. Also it is advisable to use hasNextInt()

       catch (Exception e) {
            System.out.println("Error!");
           input.next();// Move to next other wise exception
        }

Before reading integer value you need to make sure scanner has one. And you will not need exception handling like that.

    Scanner scanner = new Scanner(System.in);
    int n1 = 0, n2 = 0;
    boolean bError = true;
    while (bError) {
        if (scanner.hasNextInt())
            n1 = scanner.nextInt();
        else {
            scanner.next();
            continue;
        }
        if (scanner.hasNextInt())
            n2 = scanner.nextInt();
        else {
            scanner.next();
            continue;
        }
        bError = false;
    }
    System.out.println(n1);
    System.out.println(n2);

Javadoc of Scanner

When a scanner throws an InputMismatchException, the scanner will not pass the token that caused the exception, so that it may be retrieved or skipped via some other method.