Exceptions and Scanners

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Definition: An exception is an event, which occurs during the execution of a program, that disrupts the normal flow of the program’s instructions.

When an error occurs within a method, the method creates an object and hands it off to the runtime system. The object, called an exception object, contains information about the error, including its type and the state of the program when the error occurred. Creating an exception object and handing it to the runtime systems is called throwing an exception.

After a method throws an exception, the runtime system attempts to find something to handle it. The set of possible “somethings” to handle the exception is the ordered list of methods that had been called to get to the method where the error occured. The list of methods is known as the call stack.

Exceptions enable you to write the main flow of your code and to deal with the exceptional cases elsewhere. If the readFile function used exceptions instead of traditional error-management techniques, it would look more like the following.

readFile {
    try {
        open the file;
        determine its size;
        allocate that much memory;
        read the file into memory;
        close the file;
    } catch (fileOpenFailed) {
       doSomething;
    } catch (sizeDeterminationFailed) {
        doSomething;
    } catch (memoryAllocationFailed) {
        doSomething;
    } catch (readFailed) {
        doSomething;
    } catch (fileCloseFailed) {
        doSomething;
    }
}

Scanning

Objects of type Scanner are useful for breaking down formatted input into tokens and translating individual tokens according to their data type. By default, a scanner uses white space to separate tokens.

import java.io.FileReader;
import java.io.BufferedReader;
import java.io.IOException;
import java.util.Scanner;
import java.util.Locale;

public class ScanSum {
    public static void main(String[] args) throws IOException {

        Scanner s = null;
        double sum = 0;

        try {
            s = new Scanner(new BufferedReader(new FileReader("usnumbers.txt")));
            s.useLocale(Locale.US);

            while (s.hasNext()) {
                if (s.hasNextDouble()) {
                    sum += s.nextDouble();
                } else {
                    s.next();
                }   
            }
        } finally {
            s.close();
        }

        System.out.println(sum);
    }
}

8.5
32,767
3.14159
1,000,000.1

Sources

What is an Exception?

Scanning