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

I'll put my $0.02 in. Sometimes you wind up needing to add a "finally" later on in your code (because who ever writes their code perfectly the first time?). In those cases, suddenly it makes more sense to have the try/catch outside the loop. For example:

try {
    for(int i = 0; i < max; i++) {
        String myString = ...;
        float myNum = Float.parseFloat(myString);
        dbConnection.update("MY_FLOATS","INDEX",i,"VALUE",myNum);
    }
} catch (NumberFormatException ex) {
    return null;
} finally {
    dbConnection.release();  // Always release DB connection, even if transaction fails.
}

Because if you get an error, or not, you only want to release your database connection (or pick your favorite type of other resource...) once.