Empty Exception Block

Description

Demonstrations

The following examples help to illustrate the nature of this weakness and describe methods or techniques which can be used to mitigate the risk.

Note that the examples here are by no means exhaustive and any given weakness may have many subtle varieties, each of which may require different detection methods or runtime controls.

Example One

In the following Java example, the code catches an ArithmeticException.

public class Main {

  public static void main(String[] args) {
    int a = 1;
    int b = 0;
    int c = 0;

    try {
      c = a / b;

    } catch(ArithmeticException ae) {
    }

  }

}

Since the exception block is empty, no action is taken.

In the code below the exception has been logged and the bad execution has been handled in the desired way allowing the program to continue in an expected way.

public class Main {

  public static void main(String[] args) {
    int a = 1;
    int b = 0;
    int c = 0;

    try {
      c = a / b;

    } catch(ArithmeticException ae) {
      log.error("Divided by zero detected, setting to -1.");
      c = -1;

    }

  }

}

See Also