Using Regular Expressions to locate code that buries exceptions

Ok, Its a similar story as my last post. Sometimes developers catch exceptions and dont do anything with them. This makes it especially hard to detect when things dont work because there are no errors being reported!

This is my attempt at locating empty catch blocks using a regular expression

catch[\n\r\s]*\([\n\r\s]*(final[\n\r\s]*)?\S+[\n\r\s]*\S+[\n\r\s]*\)[\n\r\s]*\{[\r\n\s\w]*(?!throw)[\r\n\s\w]*\}

Using Regular Expressions to find Exception blocks which don't use exception chaining.

I have worked on a number of projects where developer have overlooked the importance of exception chaining when handling exceptions and rethrowing them as a different type. This masks the real issue, and makes root cause analysis difficult.

Typically when I start a project, I try to go through all of the code and find all instances of where exception chaining was overlooked.

When working on a project with thousands of source files this can be quite time consuming. Luckily most modern editors support searching through code using regular expressions.

So I wrote a RegEx which will allow me to find all instances where an exception is rethrown, which doesn't use exception chaining. There is one case that this expression returns a false positive, and this is where you rethrow an exception without passing a message to the new one. For Example: throw new Exception(e); But it does help get the job done!

An enhancement I would like to use in the future would be matching groups so that I can easily do find and replace. But, here is what I have for now!

catch[\n\r\s]*\([\n\r\s]*(final[\n\r\s]*)?\S+[\n\r\s]*\S+[\n\r\s]*\)[\n\r\s]*\{[\n\r\s]*throw[\n\r\s]*new[\n\r\s]*\S+\([\n\r\s]*[^,][\n\r\s]*\)