Develop Reference

Java: try/catch with InputMismatchException creates infinite loop while reading of a file

I have a task to make a program that will add up all the valid integers in a file and to ignore anything that isn’t a valid int. I have to use Try and Catch.
File Numbers = new File("Numbers.txt");
Scanner readFile = null;
int i = 0;
int total= 0;
boolean success = false;
while(!success){
try {
readFile = new Scanner(Numbers);
while(readFile.hasNext()){
i = readFile.nextInt();
System.out.println(i);
total = i + total;
};
success = true;// Ends The loop
} catch (FileNotFoundException e1) {
System.err.println(Numbers.getName()+" does not exist");
}
catch(InputMismatchException e2){
System.err.println("Data incorrect type expecting an int found: " + readFile.nextLine());
readFile.next();
}
System.out.println("total is: " + total);
};
The problem is that the program gets caught in an infinite loop, where instead of going past the exception it just starts again.The task seems pretty straight forward, yet i don't know why it wont work?

You fall into infinite loop because when exception happens, the success variable didn't change its value to true. In order to do some action even when exception happens you should add the finnaly block. It could look like this:
try {
// do some stuff
} catch (Exception e) {
// catch the exception
} finally {
if (!readFile.hasNext()) success = true;
}
And by the way, never do this: catch (Exception e), I did it just for example sake. Instead always catch the specific exception. Because Exception is the most basic class in the exception hierarchy, so it will catch up all the exceptions, and unless you re-throw it you could have false feeling of "safiness". When you want to catch all the exceptions, you should do this:
try {
// do stuff
} catch (RuntimeException e) {
throw e;
} catch (Exception e) {
e.printStackTrace(); // or other approptiate action, i.e. log it.
}

Assume any of the following FileNotFound or InputMismatchException exceptions will raise, then your program wont change success to true. Thus it returns to the outer while loop and read the same file. Because nothing has changed the same Exception will be thrown again.
==> Endless loop.
To fix that I suggest to move the try/catch block to the inner while.

How do I display an exception?

I am checking if number the user entered is Zeckendorf and I want to display an exception if it is not, how do i do that? Also how do I convert the Zeckondorf to its decimal equivalent?
import java.util.Scanner;
public class IZeckendorfNumberConvertor {
static String number;
int zeckonderEquivalent;
static Scanner scanner = new Scanner(System.in);
public static void main(String[] args) {
convertToZeckonderNumber();
isTrueZeckonderNumber();
}
private static boolean isTrueZeckonderNumber() {
System.out.println("Enter a Zeckonder Number:");
number = scanner.nextLine();
if (number.equals("10100"))
{
return true; }
else if (number.equals("010011") || number.equals("010100"))
{
return false; }
return false;
}
private static void convertToZeckonderNumber() {
}}

I advise you not to display an exception (i.e. trace and such) as it is very user Unfriendly.
You can use the throw syntax to throw a proper exception :
throw new Exception("Given number is not a Zeckendorf number");
but be sure to catch it and display a nice and clean message :
try {
// Your input code goes here
} catch (Exception e) {
System.out.println(e.getMessage());
}
Another easier option will be to just check the return value of the method and print the results accordingly.
I will recommend to use the latter solution as exceptions are used when something bad and unexpected happens in your program and you want to handle it gracefully. In your case the behavior is expected (i.e. user giving a wrong number) so checking the return value will be much clean and easier.

Use try catch block for catch an exception
try {
} catch (Exception e) {
e.printStackTrace();
}
Also use throw for throw a new exception

Assuming to really do want to display the exception, and not a more user friendly message, the first step is probably to get the exception as a string. Then you can do what you like with that string (echo to console, place in a javax.swing.JTextArea, email it, etc).
If you just want the message from the exception, then getMessage() will do:
try { ... }
catch(FooException e) {
String msg = e.getMessage();
}
However, if you want the whole exception, stack trace and all, you'll want something like this:
public static String stackTrace(Exception e) {
StringWriter w = new StringWriter();
e.printStackTrace(new PrintWriter(w));
return w.toString();
}
// ...
try { ... }
catch(FooException e) {
String st = stackTrace(e);
}
If you just want to echo the full stack trace to the console, there is the printStackTrace(), no-arg method:
try { ... }
catch(FooException e) {
e.printStackTrace();
}
If you want to take more control of the presentation of the stack trace you can get the details with:
try { ... }
catch(FooException e) {
StackTraceElement[] stes = e.getStackTrace();
// Do something pretty with 'stes' here...
}

You can just print a error message to the user saying that the input is wrong using a simple if.
if(yourCondition){
// Happy scenario
// Go shead
}else{
// Error Scenario
System.out.println("Error. Invalid Input.");
// If you persist to throw an exception, then you can do something like this
// throw new Exception("Exception Explanation"); // I've commented this, but you can uncomment it if needed
// But the advice is to display an error message, than throw a exception.
}
And regarding the conversion, you can convert binary to decimal like this
int i = Integer.parseInt(binaryString, 2); // 2 indicates the radix here, since you want to convert from binary.

With this code snippet you can convert the String into an integer :
int numberAsInt;
try {
numberAsInt = Integer.parseInt(number);
} catch (NumberFormatException e) {
//Will throw an Exception
}
If you want to create your own Exception class, you can do it like shown here or just throw a RuntimeException with
throw new RuntimeException("Your Message");

My opinion, you can try some thing like following
public static void main(String[] args) {
if(!isTrueZeckonderNumber()){
// your message should goes here
System.out.println("Your message");
}
}
If you really want to throws an exception do following
private static boolean isTrueZeckonderNumber() throws Exception{
System.out.println("Enter a Zeckonder Number:");
number = scanner.nextLine();
if (number.equals("10100")) {
return true;
} else{
throw new Exception("your message");
}
}

What do you mean you want to display an exception?
I would suggest just giving the user feedback instead, as exceptions are used more commonly for EXCEPTIONAL actions that are not supposed to happen.
However if you do want to, you can print a message explaining what happened.
try {
} catch (Exception e) {
System.out.println(e.getMessage());
}

How to avoid printing exception and assign another action when exception was encountered? My attempt don't work right

I am encountering an error when user doesn't type anything into input statement. I thought of using Try/Catch blocks to instead throw exception to set boolAskRepeat to true which should skip to the end of the code and repeat the loop.
This doesn't work, and I believe I'm missing something but I'm not sure what... It still throws exception saying:
Exception in thread "main" java.lang.StringIndexOutOfBoundsException: String index out of range: 0
at java.lang.String.charAt(Unknown Source)
at ITSLab03.main(ITSLab03.java:34)
Which is this line of code: inputStatus = input.readLine().toLowerCase().charAt(0);
What am I doing wrong here?
while (boolAskStatus == true)
{
System.out.print("Employment Status (F or P): ");
try
{
inputStatus = input.readLine().toLowerCase().charAt(0);
if (inputStatus == "f".charAt(0))
{
boolAskStatus = false;
String stringCheckSalary = null;
boolean boolCheckSalary = true;
while (boolCheckSalary == true)
{
// some code
}
outputData(inputName, inputStatus, calculateFullTimePay(inputSalary));
}
else if (inputStatus == "p".charAt(0))
{
// some code
outputData(inputName, inputStatus, calculatePartTimePay(inputRate, inputHours));
}
else boolAskStatus = true;
}
catch (IOException e) { boolAskStatus = true; }
}

You need to catch StringIndexOutOfBoundsException as well (If you observe the stack trace properly this is the exception you are getting)
catch (StringIndexOutOfBoundsException e) {
boolAskStatus = true;
}
(or)
catch Exception which catches all runtime exceptions
catch (Exception e) {
boolAskStatus = true;
}

The normal try catch pattern should look like this:
try
{
// code that is vulnerable to crash
}
catch (Specific-Exception1 e1)
{
// perform action pertaining to this exception
}
catch (Specific-Exception2 e2)
{
// perform action pertaining to this exception
}
....
....
catch (Exception exp) // general exception, all exceptions will be caught
{
// Handle general exceptions. Normally i would end the program or
// inform the user that something unexpected occurred.
}

By using .charAt(0), you are assuming that the String has a length > 0.
You could simplify this a bunch by just doing:
String entry = input.readLine().toLowerCase();
if (entry.startsWith("f")) {
...
}
else if ("entry".startsWith("p")) {
...
}

Your code doesn't work the way you want because input.readLine().toLowerCase().charAt(0) throws a StringIndexOutOfBoundsException, which is not an IOException, so the catch block never gets hit. You can make it work by changing the catch to
catch (StringIndexOutOfBoundsExceptione e) { boolAskStatus = true; }
But...
It's generally not a good idea to base your program's normal behaviour on exception handling. Think of exception throwing as something that could happen, but usually won't. Why not use something like:
final String STATUS_F = "f";
final String STATUS_P = "p";
String fromUser = null;
do {
String rawInput = input.readLine().toLowerCase();
if (rawInput.startsWith(STATUS_F)) {
fromUser = STATUS_F;
} else if (rawInput.startsWith(STATUS_P)) {
fromUser = STATUS_P;
}
} while (fromUser == null);
if (STATUS_F.equals(fromUser)) {
// do something
} else if (STATUS_P.equals(fromUser)) {
// do something else
} else {
// Shouldn't be able to get here!
throw new Exception("WTF!?");
}
It much easier for another person reading this to understand why the program loops and how the loop is controlled, in part because the code that figures out what the user is inputting and the code that decides what to do with that information are separated. Plus, you don't need to deal with exceptions.

continuing execution after an exception is thrown in java

I'm trying to throw an exception (without using a try catch block) and my program finishes right after the exception is thrown. Is there a way that after I throw the exception, to then continue execution of my program? I throw the InvalidEmployeeTypeException which I've defined in another class but I'd like the program to continue after this is thrown.
private void getData() throws InvalidEmployeeTypeException{
System.out.println("Enter filename: ");
Scanner prompt = new Scanner(System.in);
inp = prompt.nextLine();
File inFile = new File(inp);
try {
input = new Scanner(inFile);
} catch (FileNotFoundException ex) {
ex.printStackTrace();
System.exit(1);
}
String type, name;
int year, salary, hours;
double wage;
Employee e = null;
while(input.hasNext()) {
try{
type = input.next();
name = input.next();
year = input.nextInt();
if (type.equalsIgnoreCase("manager") || type.equalsIgnoreCase("staff")) {
salary = input.nextInt();
if (type.equalsIgnoreCase("manager")) {
e = new Manager(name, year, salary);
}
else {
e = new Staff(name, year, salary);
}
}
else if (type.equalsIgnoreCase("fulltime") || type.equalsIgnoreCase("parttime")) {
hours = input.nextInt();
wage = input.nextDouble();
if (type.equalsIgnoreCase("fulltime")) {
e = new FullTime(name, year, hours, wage);
}
else {
e = new PartTime(name, year, hours, wage);
}
}
else {
throw new InvalidEmployeeTypeException();
input.nextLine();
continue;
}
} catch(InputMismatchException ex)
{
System.out.println("** Error: Invalid input **");
input.nextLine();
continue;
}
//catch(InvalidEmployeeTypeException ex)
//{
//}
employees.add(e);
}
}

If you throw the exception, the method execution will stop and the exception is thrown to the caller method. throw always interrupt the execution flow of the current method. a try/catch block is something you could write when you call a method that may throw an exception, but throwing an exception just means that method execution is terminated due to an abnormal condition, and the exception notifies the caller method of that condition.
Find this tutorial about exception and how they work - http://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/essential/exceptions/

Try this:
try
{
throw new InvalidEmployeeTypeException();
input.nextLine();
}
catch(InvalidEmployeeTypeException ex)
{
//do error handling
}
continue;

If you have a method that you want to throw an error but you want to do some cleanup in your method beforehand you can put the code that will throw the exception inside a try block, then put the cleanup in the catch block, then throw the error.
try {
//Dangerous code: could throw an error
} catch (Exception e) {
//Cleanup: make sure that this methods variables and such are in the desired state
throw e;
}
This way the try/catch block is not actually handling the error but it gives you time to do stuff before the method terminates and still ensures that the error is passed on to the caller.
An example of this would be if a variable changed in the method then that variable was the cause of an error. It may be desirable to revert the variable.

java's executeUpdate is not working properly

I have the following java code:
if (ps.executeUpdate() != 1)
{
// Error - did not insert one row
String err = "insert unable to insert LocalUsage data: " + usg.toString();
Logger.log(err, _MODULE_CLASS, Logger.DEBUG);
throw new DaoException(err);
}
The problem if the query had a foreign key exception, then it will be thrown but it will never get to inside the if. what should I do so that it will get inside the if and output the log I have?
The problem is that this if condition is inside a try catch block, and it is going to the catch and never enters to the if condition.

executeUpdate() might throw an SQLException, as is described in its API documentation. You might want to catch that exception.
int count;
try {
count = ps.executeUpdate();
} catch (SQLException e) {
throw new DaoException("Exception while executing update: " + e.getMessage());
}
if (count != 1) {
// ...
}

As the docs states executeUpdate() may throw an exception so your code flow will fail and you will not be able to do any processing afterwards incase your exception handling is not proper.
Which I think is happening in your code right now.
While doing database call I would suggest you do it like this:
int operationStatus;
try {
operationStatus = ps.executeUpdate();
} catch(SQLException exp) {
final String message = "SQL Exception while calling executeUpdate()";
logger.error(message, exp);
throw new DAOException(message, logger);
} catch(Exception exp) {
final String message = "Exception while calling executeUpdate()";
logger.error(message, exp);
throw new DAOException(message, logger);
} finally {
//you may wish to clean up resources if they are not going to be used after this point.
}
if(operationStatus < 0) {
//Next steps
}