Is Catching a Null Pointer Exception a Code Smell?

Posted by Drew on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Drew
Published on 2010-04-06T16:00:22Z Indexed on 2010/04/06 16:03 UTC
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nullpointerexception

Recently a co-worker of mine wrote in some code to catch a null pointer exception around an entire method, and return a single result. I pointed out how there could've been any number of reasons for the null pointer, so we changed it to a defensive check for the one result.

However, catching NullPointerException just seemed wrong to me. In my mind, Null pointer exceptions are the result of bad code and not to be an expected exception in the system.

Are there any cases where it makes sense to catch a null pointer exception?

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