Multiple or Single Try Catch [duplicate]

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I always try to reduce levels of nesting for readability and maintainability. If you have n try/catch blocks, each handling the same type of exception, why not refactor the code that can throw the exception into methods…it would look something like:

try {
    firstBatchOfTricky();
    secondBatchOfTricky();
    ....
    nthBatchOfTricky();
} catch (ItWentBoomException e) {
   // recover from boom
} catch (ItWentBangException e) {
   // recover from bang
}

This is much more readable than having multiple try/catches. Note that your methods should describe what they do in the spirit of self documenting code.

Since you have your own Exception type, you can add the data you need to the exception to do different things in the catch block. When you say ‘more specific message’, you can just throw the exception with the detailed message; you shouldn’t need multiple catch blocks. If you want to do drastically different things based on the state of the exception, just create more exception types and catch blocks but only one try block, as my pseudocode shows…

Finally, if you can’t recover from the exception(s), you should not clutter the code with catch blocks. Throw a runtime exception and let it bubble. (Good advice from @tony in the comments)

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