I know that going into a catch block has some significance cost when executing a program, however, I was wondering if entering a try{} block also had any impact so I started looking for an answer in google with many opinions, but no benchmarking at all. Some answers I found were: Java try/catch performance, is it recommended to keep what is inside the try clause to a minimum? Try Catch Performance Java Java try catch blocks However they didn't answer my question with facts, so I decided to try it for myself. Here's what I did. I have a csv file with this format: host;ip;number;date;status;email;uid;name;lastname;promo_code; where everything after status is optional and will not even have the corresponding ; , so when parsing a validation has to be done to see if the value is there, here's where the try/catch issue came to my mind. The current code that in inherited in my company does this: StringTokenizer st=new StringTokenizer(line,";"); String host = st.nextToken(); String ip = st.nextToken(); String number = st.nextToken(); String date = st.nextToken(); String status = st.nextToken(); String email = ""; try{ email = st.nextToken(); }catch(NoSuchElementException e){ email = ""; } and it repeats what it's done for email with uid, name, lastname and promo_code. and I changed everything to: if(st.hasMoreTokens()){ email = st.nextToken(); } and in fact it performs faster. When parsing a file that doesn't have the optional columns. Here are the average times: --- Trying:122 milliseconds --- Checking:33 milliseconds however, here's what confused me and the reason I'm asking: When running the example with values for the optional columns in all 8000 lines of the CSV, the if() version still performs better than the try/catch version, so my question is Does really the try block does not have any performance impact on my code? The average times for this example are: --- Trying:105 milliseconds --- Checking:43 milliseconds Can somebody explain what's going on here? Thanks a lot