Question about scoping finally blocks

Question

Hello All,
I have a piece of code here that has been tricky for me to do a finally block on and it suddenly occured to me that I have maybe been going about exceptions the wrong way. So generally with this type of situation I'll just declare the variable somewhere else above the try and when i do that the scope makes me able to finally block it. Here I can't do that because the declaration actually requires it to have an initial value and it throws it's own exception as a filereader. Sorry about the newb question, but what's the proper way to block out the exceptions and finally block for this code snippet?
Thanks in advance!
Josh
public static void setParameters(File fileName)
          try
               File fileForProcessing=new File(fileName.getAbsolutePath());
               //wrap the file in a filereader and buffered reader for maximum processing
               FileReader theReader=new FileReader(fileForProcessing);
               BufferedReader bufferedReader=new BufferedReader(theReader);
               //fill in data into the tempquestion variable to be populated
               //Set the question and answer texts back to default
               questionText="";
               answerText="";
               //Define the question variable as a Stringbuffer so new data can be appended to it
               StringBuffer endQuestion=new StringBuffer();
               String tempQuestion="";
               //Define new file with the absolutepath and the filename for use in parsing out question/answer data
               tempQuestion=bufferedReader.readLine();
               //while there are more lines append the stringbuffer with the new data to complete the question buffer
               while(tempQuestion!=null)
                    endQuestion.append(tempQuestion);
                    tempQuestion=bufferedReader.readLine();
               //Set the answer to the stringbuffer after converting to string
               answerText=endQuestion.toString();
               //code to take the filename and replace _ with a space and put that in the question text
               char theSpace=' ';
               char theUnderline='_';
               questionText=(fileName.getName()).replace(theUnderline, theSpace);
          catch(FileNotFoundException exception)
               logger.log(Level.WARNING,"The File was Not Found\n"+exception.getMessage()+"\n"+exception.getStackTrace(),exception);
          catch(IOException exception)
               logger.log(Level.SEVERE,exception.getMessage()+"\n"+exception.getStackTrace(),exception);
          finally
               try
               theReader.close();
               catch(Exception e)
     }

Answer 1

Here I can't do that
because the declaration actually requires it tohave
an initial value No, it doesn't.Yes it does. But that value can be and should be
null.I suspect it would be more accurate to say that dereferencing the variable in the finally block requires definite assignment. The declaration itself doesn't require it at all and in fact assignment could be deferred. However, just assigning null in the declaration is still probably the best idea.
FileReader theReader = null;
try {
    // yadda yadda
} finally {
   if (theReader != null) {
       theReader.close();
}