Empty catch blocks

Question

I sometimes run into situations where I need to catch an exception if it\'s ever thrown but never do anything with it. In other words, an exception could occur but it doesn\

Answer 1

An empty catch block is fine in the right place - though from your sample I would say you should cetagorically NOT be using catch (Exception). You should instead catch the explicit exception that you expect to occur.

The reason for this is that, if you swallow everything, you will swallow critical defects that you weren't expecting, too. There's a world of difference between "I can't send to this email address" and "your computer is out of disk space." You don't want to keep trying to send the next 10000 emails if you're out of disk space!

The difference between "should not happen" and "don't care if it happens" is that, if it "should not happen" then, when it does happen, you don't want to swallow it silently! If it's a condition you never expected to occur, you would typically want your application to crash (or at least terminate cleanly and log profusely what's happened) so that you can identify this impossible condition.