You could return a null string, or an empty array, and the check it like the below, however, if an exception occurs you might not want to catch it, or you may want to re-throw it after it was caught (supplying additional information), regardless, if you are calling a method that can throw an exception, said method should be called from within a try catch block, its from within your catch block in the calling method that
you should be doing any clean up.