Try Catch or If statement?

Question

if you think there is a possibility of getting a null pointer exception, should you use an if statement to make sure the variable is not null, or should you just catch the e

Answer 1

The main Question is if it is a good idea to have methods returning Null at all, personally i do not have any problem with this, but as soon as you try to access modifiers of an object returned from this method and you forget to check if it is assigned this becomes an issue.

Ken has a good answer about this:

If you are always expecting to find a value then throw the exception if it is missing. The exception would mean that there was a problem.

If the value can be missing or present and both are valid for the application logic then return a null.

See this disscussion abou tthis issue:

Returning null is usually the best idea if you intend to indicate that no data is available.

An empty object implies data has been returned, whereas returning null clearly indicates that nothing has been returned.

Additionally, returning a null will result in a null exception if you attempt to access members in the object, which can be useful for highlighting buggy code - attempting to access a member of nothing makes no sense. Accessing members of an empty object will not fail meaning bugs can go undiscovered.

Some further reading:

• No Null Beyond Method Scope

• Should We Return Null From Our Methods?