Is there any valid reason to ever ignore a caught exception

Question

Wow, I just got back a huge project in C# from outsourced developers and while going through my code review my analysis tool revealed bunches of what it considered bad stuff

Answer 1

The following only applies to languages that have checked exceptions, e.g. Java:

Sometimes a method throws a checked Exception that you know won't happen, e.g. some java APIs expect an encoding name as a string and throw a UnsupportedEncodingException if the given encoding isn't supported. But usually i pass a literal "UTF-8" that i know is supported so I could theoretically write an empty catch there.

Instead of doing that (empty catch) I usually throw a generic unchecked exception wrapping the "impossible" exception, or I even declare a class ImpossibleException that i throw. Because my theory about that error condition being impossible might be wrong and in that case I wouldn't want the exception to be swallowed.