Is it OK to try/catch something just to check if an exception was thrown or not?

Question

Is it a good way to try something useless just to see if a particular exception is thrown by this code ?
I want to do something when the exception is thrown, and nothing

Answer 1

Performance might not be great and the syntax verbose, but the code is very precise about what it does. There is no duplication between check and use, which is always a big concern.

(Note, this particular sort of conversion to and from strings is really for debugging and internal configuration. It doesn't handle locales and other human-oriented consideration. Use in file formats and wire protocols introduces a strong dependency to the representation used by the class.)