How can I avoid throwing EmptyStackException?

Question

The following method will throw an EmptyStackException:
     * Insert HTML into {@link javax.swing.JEditorPane} using {@link javax.swing.text.html.HTMLEditorKit}
     * @throws java.io.IOException Thrown if an I/O error occurs
     * @throws javax.swing.text.BadLocationException Thrown if the location is not a valid location
     * @throws java.lang.Exception Thrown if all other exceptions occur
    private void insertHTML() throws IOException, BadLocationException, Exception {
        // ASSUMES EDITOR IS ALREADY SET TO "text/html" TYPE
        HTMLEditorKit kit = new HTMLEditorKit();
        HttpURLConnection conn = (HttpURLConnection)getURL().openConnection();
        BufferedReader in = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(conn.getInputStream()));
        String data = "";
        StringBuffer sb = new StringBuffer();
        while ((data = in.readLine()) != null) sb.append(data);
        StringReader sr = new StringReader(sb.toString());
        try {
            kit.read(sr, browser.getDocument(), 0);
        } catch (ChangedCharSetException e) {
            // DO NOTHING
        } catch (RuntimeException e2) {
            // DO NOTHING - NOT INSERTING NEW CONTENT INTO BODY ELEMENT
        } catch (Exception e3) {
            e3.printStackTrace();
    }Case in point: If I use "http://www.cnn.com" it will load into JEditorPane (not well, but it loads). If I go to "http://java.net", it will also load that into JEditorPane. However, if I return to "http://www.cnn.com", I get the EmptyStackException on that URL alone; the URL itself only partially loads into JEditoPane as a result.
Is there a workaround for this periodic problem?
Thanx
Phil

Answer 1

I will make a couple of points though.
* It's generally bad practice to delare a method to throw Exception, rather than more specific ones.
* If you do declare your method to throw Exception, declaring IOException adn BadLocationException is redundant, as they're subclasses of Exception
* It's also generally bad to just catch Exception, rather than more specific ones. There are cases where it's legitimate, and without more context I can't tell if this is one of them, but my gut would say no at this point.
* Just printing the stack trace or doing nothing is not generally good exception handling. Again, there are cases where it's legitimate, but in general, it means that the caller of this method thinks everything went fine, and will proceed as if it did, even though it didn't.
* It's genrally considered good practice to use { } around your if/while/etc. bodies even when it's just a single statement and not strictly necessary. It's more consistent, more readable, and prevents logic errors if you go to add more statements to the body later.