Should try…catch go inside or outside a loop?

Question

I have a loop that looks something like this:

for (int i = 0; i < max; i++) {
    String myString = ...;
    float myNum = Float.parseFloat(myString);
            


        

Answer 1

That depends on the failure handling. If you just want to skip the error elements, try inside:

for(int i = 0; i < max; i++) {
    String myString = ...;
    try {
        float myNum = Float.parseFloat(myString);
        myFloats[i] = myNum;
    } catch (NumberFormatException ex) {
        --i;
    }
}

In any other case i would prefer the try outside. The code is more readable, it is more clean. Maybe it would be better to throw an IllegalArgumentException in the error case instead if returning null.