Want to know reason behind NumberFormat Exception in my code

Question

I am trying to read file with BufferedReader and at the time of spliting each line of file I want to convert string data at 8th position to be converted to float.(count starts from 0 data)

below is my code :

import java.io.BufferedReader;
import java.io.FileReader;
import java.io.IOException;

public class TestFloat {
    static BufferedReader bin;
    String line;
    void sumAmount() throws IOException //Perform calculation
    {

        bin =  new BufferedReader(new FileReader("D:\\Extras\\file.txt"));
        //String firstline = bin.readLine();
        while ((line = bin.readLine()) != null) 
        {
            String data[] = line.split(",");
            //System.out.println(data[8]);
            System.out.println(Float.valueOf(data[8]));
            //System.out.println(java.lang.Float.parseFloat(data[8]))
        }
    }
    public static void main(String[] args) 
    {
    TestFloat ts = new TestFloat();
    try {
        ts.sumAmount();
    } catch (IOException e) {
        // TODO Auto-generated catch block
        e.printStackTrace();
    }

    }

}

for this code I am getting exception as below :

Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NumberFormatException: empty String
    at sun.misc.FloatingDecimal.readJavaFormatString(FloatingDecimal.java:1842)
    at sun.misc.FloatingDecimal.parseFloat(FloatingDecimal.java:122)
    at java.lang.Float.parseFloat(Float.java:451)
    at java.lang.Float.valueOf(Float.java:416)
    at TestFloat.sumAmount(TestFloat.java:17)
    at TestFloat.main(TestFloat.java:24)

one sample line of file.txt is :

20,20160518,262,20160518,00,F&O ABC DEBIT F 160518,000405107289,000405006220,5000000.00,5000000.00,0.00,, 

I have tried with parseFloat and valueOf both function but it shows exception. What is the reason behind the fail?

Answer 1

java.lang.NumberFormatException: empty String

as the error states you're attempting to parse an empty string.

one solution is to use an if statement to guard off the NumberFormatException(only for empty strings that is, you could still get the NumberFormatException for unparseable strings).

if(data[8] != null && data[8].length() > 0){
     System.out.println(Float.valueOf(data[8]));
     System.out.println(java.lang.Float.parseFloat(data[8]));
}

you'll need to go through the debugger step by step and see what is the real issue behind it.