Removing Exception Handling Causes Compiler Error

Question

I am very new to Java. I have a background in other programming languages including Ruby. I am in need of a convenient means to parse XML code. I picked up the code shown at the end of this message on the Internet. In its original form, it works perfectly. I experimented by trying to comment out the try block as you can see. I was surprised to find that in that form it wouldn't compile. In essence, I thought what I was doing was simply removing exception handling. I figured that since the code worked and there were no exceptions being thrown, it would work just fine for experimentation purposes. (I understand that I would not want to do this in production mode.) Can someone please explain to me why removing the exception handling causes the program to fail to compile?
Thanks for any input.
... doug
/* Experimental Code */
/* http://www.mkyong.com/java/how-to-read-xml-file-in-java-dom-parser/ */
import javax.xml.parsers.DocumentBuilderFactory;
import javax.xml.parsers.DocumentBuilder;
import org.w3c.dom.Document;
import org.w3c.dom.NodeList;
import org.w3c.dom.Node;
import org.w3c.dom.Element;
import java.io.File;
public class ReadXMLFile {
public static void main(String argv[]) {
try {
File fXmlFile = new File("ReadXMLFile.xml");
DocumentBuilderFactory dbFactory = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance();
DocumentBuilder dBuilder = dbFactory.newDocumentBuilder();
Document doc = dBuilder.parse(fXmlFile);
doc.getDocumentElement().normalize();
System.out.println("Root element :" + doc.getDocumentElement().getNodeName());
NodeList nList = doc.getElementsByTagName("staff");
System.out.println("-----------------------");
for (int temp = 0; temp < nList.getLength(); temp++) {
Node nNode = nList.item(temp);     
if (nNode.getNodeType() == Node.ELEMENT_NODE) {
Element eElement = (Element) nNode;
System.out.println("First Name : " + getTagValue("firstname",eElement));
System.out.println("Last Name : " + getTagValue("lastname",eElement));
System.out.println("Nick Name : " + getTagValue("nickname",eElement));
System.out.println("Salary : " + getTagValue("salary",eElement));
} catch (Exception e) {
e.printStackTrace();
private static String getTagValue(String sTag, Element eElement){
NodeList nlList= eElement.getElementsByTagName(sTag).item(0).getChildNodes();
Node nValue = (Node) nlList.item(0);
return nValue.getNodeValue();
}

Answer 1

877757 wrote:
I figured that since the code worked and there were no exceptions being thrown, it would work just fine for experimentation purposes. The compiler doesn't know that your code works. It only knows that some method you call can throw some checked exception, and it requires you to catch it or declare that you don't.