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

A comment on kriss' answer: I don't see a "superb memory leak" here. There is no reference to the created BigDecimal. As soon as this method completes, and we go out of scope, the object is eligible for garbage collection.

Memory leaks occur when we hold references we no longer need so the object can't be garbage collected.