Java 7 catching multiple exception types

In Java 7 and later it is possible to avoid code duplication by using a single catch block to handle more than one type of exception. The bytecode generated for a single catch block handling multiple exceptions is smaller compared to an equivalent implementation with multiple catch blocks and thus considered better for performance.

Consider a simple example to read a file with numbers and create a list of numbers. In Java 6 and earlier, we do an implementation similar to the one below. Here we repeat the same exception handling code in each of the catch blocks.

public static List<Integer> readFile(String fileName) {
  List<Integer> myList = new ArrayList<Integer>();
  BufferedReader in = null;
  try {
    in = new BufferedReader(new FileReader(fileName));
        String line = null;
        while ((line = in.readLine()) != null)
        {
          int num = Integer.parseInt(line);
            myList.add(num);
        }
  } catch (NumberFormatException e) {
    // do some action
    e.printStackTrace();
  } catch (IOException e) {
    // do some action
    e.printStackTrace();
  } 
  finally {
    try {
      if ( in != null ) 
        in.close();
    } catch (IOException e) {
      e.printStackTrace();
    }
  }
  return myList;
}

In Java 7 it is possible to specify a single catch block to handle multiple exceptions to eliminate duplicate code. Each of the exception types a catch block needs to handle is separated by a vertical bar "|". This implementation is considered efficient since the byte code generated is smaller.

public static List<Integer> readFileMultiCatch(String fileName) {
  List<Integer> myList = new ArrayList<Integer>();
  BufferedReader in = null;
  try {
    in = new BufferedReader(new FileReader(fileName));
        String line = null;
        while ((line = in.readLine()) != null)
        {
          int num = Integer.parseInt(line);
            myList.add(num);
        }
  } catch (NumberFormatException | IOException e) {
    // do some action
    e.printStackTrace();
  } 
  finally {
    try {
      if ( in != null ) 
        in.close();
    } catch (IOException e) {
      e.printStackTrace();
    }
  }
  return myList;
}