java try finally block to close stream

Question

I want to close my stream in the finally block, but it throws an IOException so it seems like I have to nest another try block in my finally<

Answer 1

Like the answer mentioning the Commons IO library, the Google Guava Libraries has a similar helper method for things which are java.io.Closeable. The class is com.google.common.io.Closeables. The function you are looking for is similarly named as Commons IO: closeQuietly().

Or you could roll your own to close a bunch like this: Closeables.close(closeable1, closeable2, closeable3, ...) :

import java.io.Closeable;
import java.util.HashMap;
import java.util.Map;

public class Closeables {
  public Map close(Closeable... closeables) {

  HashMap exceptions = null;

  for (Closeable closeable : closeables) {
    try {
      if(closeable != null) closeable.close();
    } catch (Exception e) {
        if (exceptions == null) {
          exceptions = new HashMap();
        }
        exceptions.put(closeable, e);
      }
    }

    return exceptions;
  }
}

And that even returns a map of any exceptions that were thrown or null if none were.