Java: How to throw an Exception to the method caller inside a try catch body?

I think I'm confused by the specifics of your example -- why are you making the broad

} catch (Exception e) { 

If that overly-generic catch clause wasn't there, your problem would go away.

Did I misunderstand?

You can check if your exception is an instance of IOException and if it is, rethrow it.

catch( Exception e ) { if( e instanceof IOException ) { throw (IOException)e; } } 

You can catch it, and re-throw it, but the correct solution should be to be more selective of what you are catching in your catch statement....

For example. In the code below, I am catching a FileNotFoundException, so the IOException is thrown back to the calling method.

public static void foo(String param) throws IOException { try { // some IOoperations if (param.isEmpty()) { throw new IOException("param is empty"); } // some other IOoperations } catch (FileNotFoundException e) { /* handle some possible errors of of the IOoperations */ } } 

I would create a subclass of IOException. This will let you use an instanceof check and rethrow.

And there are very few cases where I use catch (Exception). It's almost always better to catch specific exceptions. The only reason not to is when you want to aggregate exceptions and rethrow (reflection operations are a common place to do this).

If IOExceptions are meant for the foo() caller, you can do this:

public static void foo(String param) throws IOException { try { // some IOoperations if (param.isEmpty()) { throw new IOException("param is empty"); } // some other IOoperations } catch (IOException e) { throw e; } catch (Exception e) { /* handle some possible errors of of the IOoperations */ } } 

If your exception is the only one really needed to be rethrown, then create a new Subtype of IOException name it MyException an try to catch MyException to rethrow it.

Any pokemon exception handling is very ugly !