This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
20.9 The IOException Classes
Every I/O-specific error detected by classes in java.io is signaled by an IOException or a subclass. Most I/O classes are designed to be general, so most of the exceptions cannot be listed specifically. For example, InputStream methods that throw IOException cannot detail which particular exceptions might be thrown, because any particular input stream class might throw a subclass of IOException for particular error conditions relevant to that stream. And the filter input and output streams pass through exceptions only from their downstream objects, which can also be of other stream types.
The specific subclasses of IOException used in the java.io package are
-
CharConversionException
extends IOException
- Thrown when a character conversion problem occurs in a character stream operation that must convert local character codes to Unicode or vice versa.
-
EOFException
extends IOException
- Thrown when the end of the file (stream) is detected while reading.
-
FileNotFoundException
extends IOException
- Thrown when the attempt to access the file specified by a given pathname fails—presumably because the file does not exist.
-
InterruptedIOException
extends IOException
- Thrown when a blocking I/O operation detects that the current thread has been interrupted before or during the operation. In principle, except for the Print stream methods, interrupting a thread should cause this exception if the thread is performing a blocking I/O operation. In practice most implementations only check for interruption before performing an operation and do not respond to interruption during the operation (see page 515) so you cannot rely on the ability to interrupt a blocked thread. This exception is also used to signify that a time-out occurred during network I/O.
-
InvalidClassException
extends ObjectStreamException
- Thrown when the serialization mechanism detects a problem with a class: The serial version of the class does not match that read from the stream, the class contains unknown data types, or the class does not have an accessible no-arg constructor when needed.
-
InvalidObjectException
extends ObjectStreamException
- Thrown when the validateObject method cannot make the object valid, thus aborting the deserialization.
-
NotActiveException
extends ObjectStreamException
- Thrown when a serialization method, such as defaultReadObject, is invoked when serialization is not under way on the stream.
-
NotSerializableException
extends ObjectStreamException
- Thrown either by the serialization mechanism or explicitly by a class when a class cannot be serialized.
-
ObjectStreamException
extends IOException
- The superclass for all the Object stream related exceptions.
-
OptionalDataException
extends ObjectStreamException
- Thrown when the optional data (that is, not part of default serialization) in the object input stream is corrupt or was not read by the reading method.
-
StreamCorruptedException
extends ObjectStreamException
- Thrown when internal object stream state is missing or invalid.
-
SyncFailedException
extends IOException
- Thrown by FileDescriptor.sync when the data cannot be guaranteed to have been written to the underlying media.
-
UnsupportedEncodingException
extends IOException
- Thrown when an unknown character encoding is specified.
-
UTFDataFormatException
extends IOException
- Thrown by DataInputStream.readUTF when the string it is reading has malformed UTF syntax.
-
WriteAbortedException
extends ObjectStreamException
- Thrown when an exception occurred during a serialization write operation.
In addition to these specific exceptions, other exceptional conditions in java.io are signaled with an IOException containing a string that describes the specific error encountered. For example, using a Piped stream object that has never been connected throws an exception object with a detail string such as "Pipenot connected", and trying to push more than the allowed number of characters onto a PushbackReader throws an exception with the string "Pushbackbuffer overflow". Such exceptions are difficult to catch explicitly, so this style of exception reporting is not in favor. Specific exception subtypes should be created for each category of exceptional circumstance.