Try / Catch in Constructor - Recommended Practice?

In the code you show, the validation problems don't communicate back to the code that is creating this object instance. That's probably not a GOOD THING.

Variation 1:

If you catch the exception inside the method/constructor, be sure to pass something back to the caller. You could put a field isValid that gets set to true if all works. That would look like this:

private boolean isValid = false;

public FileDataValidator(String[] lineData){

    this.lineData = lineData;
    removeLeadingAndTrailingQuotes();

    try
    {
        validateName();
        validateAge();
        validateTown();
        isValid = true;
    }
    catch(InvalidFormatException e)
    {
        isValid = false;
    }
}

public boolean isValid() {
    return isValid;
}

Variation 2:

Or you could let the exception or some other exception propagate to the caller. I have shown it as a non-checked exception but do whatever works according to your exception handling religion:

public FileDataValidator(String[] lineData){

    this.lineData = lineData;
    removeLeadingAndTrailingQuotes();

    try
    {
        validateName();
        validateAge();
        validateTown();
    }
    catch(InvalidFormatException e)
    {
        throw new com.myco.myapp.errors.InvalidDataException(e.getMessage());
    }

}

Variation 3:

The third method I want to mention has code like this. In the calling code you have to call the constructor and then call the build() function which will either work or not.

String[] lineData = readLineData();
FileDataValidator onePerson = new FileDataValidator();
try {
    onePerson.build(lineData);
} catch (InvalidDataException e) {
    // What to do it its bad?
}

Here is the class code:

public FileDataValidator() {
    // maybe you need some code in here, m