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 general, try-catch blocks are great because they will break (move to the catch statement) whenever the exception occurs. If-else blocks rely on you predicting when the error will happen.

Also, catch blocks won't stop your code from halting when an error is hit.