How can I handle an IOException which I know can never be thrown, in a safe and readable manner?

Question

\"The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong go

Answer 1

Consider using the form

throw new RuntimeException("This should never happen", e);

instead. This allows you to convey meaning to the maintainer to follow you, both when reading the code but also SHOULD the exception happen to be thrown in some strange scenario.

EDIT: This is also a good way to pass exceptions through a mechanism not expecting those exceptions. E.g. if you have a "get more rows from the database" iterator the Iterator interface does not allow to throw e.g. an FileNotFoundException so you can wrap it like this. In the code USING the iterator, you can then catch the runtimeexception and inspect the original excpetion with getCause(). VERY useful when going through legacy code paths.