Is it possible to catch and handle an exception programmatically that was not explicitly checked in the code?

Yes, in Java it is possible to programmatically catch and handle exceptions, even if they were not explicitly declared in the method signature (unchecked exceptions).

Java has two types of exceptions:

• Checked exceptions — require mandatory declaration in the method via throws or handling via try-catch.
• Unchecked exceptions (subclasses of RuntimeException) — do not require mandatory declaration and can be caught in a try-catch block anywhere.

Thus, to handle any exception, you can use a try-catch block:

try {
    // code that may throw an exception
} catch (Exception e) {
    // handle the exception
}

If the exception was not explicitly checked (unchecked), it can still be caught in this way. This allows flexible error handling during runtime.