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

In my experience using if is better but only if you actually expect a null reference pointer. Without any bit of code or context its difficult to say when one option is better than the other.

There's also a matter of optimization - code in try-catch blocks won't be optimized.