What is "exception"

This is one of the most poorly understood mechanisms by programmers so it needs a lot of study. Not everyone agrees on the right way to use it. Some languages have more culture of their use and each with a slightly different way.

We have questions here that we can consider as canonical and reading them will learn a lot of what you need to solve your problem:

• Why should we avoid returning error codes?
• There is some drawback in always catching Exception and not something more specific?
• Exceptions consume a lot of processing. Truth or legend?
• Best way to deal with Exceptions
• Exceptions should be used for flow control?
• How to best treat exceptions in Java?

See also: throw.