What causes "exc (wraps parse exception, no own message)" in pentaho/pentaho-kettle?

Inspect the wrapped cause for the underlying parse error and offending field

pentaho/pentaho-kettle · error · KettleException

exc (wraps parse exception, no own message)

Error message

exc (wraps parse exception, no own message)

What it means

In CsvInputAwareHelper.getStringFromRow, when failOnParseError is true and a parsing exception (exc) was recorded earlier in the read, it is re-thrown as-is if already a KettleException, otherwise wrapped in new KettleException(exc). The visible message is just the wrapped exception's toString, since no own message is supplied.

Solutions

Inspect the wrapped cause for the underlying parse error and offending field
Correct the field's declared format/type in the step metadata to match the file
Fix the source file encoding or the bad record
If bad rows are expected, disable 'fail on parse error' and configure error handling to route them to an error stream

Defensive patterns

Strategy: try-catch

Validate before calling

// sample the file and verify typed fields parse before running the full transformation
String s = row.get(0); Integer.parseInt(s.trim()); // throws early on malformed data

Try / catch

try { helper.getStringFromRow(row, index, failOnParseError); }
catch (KettleException e) { logError("CSV parse failed: " + e.getCause(), e); routeToErrorStream(row, e); }

Prevention

Enable error handling instead of fail-on-parse-error for dirty data
Confirm file encoding matches the step setting
Preview rows in Spoon before full runs

When it happens

Trigger: Reading a CSV row whose field fails to parse into the declared type (e.g. text field with invalid encoding or malformed number/date) while the text-file-input/CSV step has 'fail on parse error' enabled.

Common situations: Data file contains empty or malformed values in typed columns, wrong file encoding causing garbled bytes, schema changed upstream (column order/types).

Understand the failure class

Background: "Invalid ... format", "must be in format X", "does not look like a ..." — invalid argument format errors across CLI tools and libraries — this error's family across 17 libraries.

Related errors

AI-assisted analysis of pentaho/pentaho-kettle@f3058517a1 (2026-09-13). Data as JSON: /api/errors/5d4d981fc4f67519. Report an issue: GitHub.

Appendix: source

Thrown at engine/src/main/java/org/pentaho/di/trans/steps/common/CsvInputAwareHelper.java:192

   * @return the row value at the given index
   */
  default String getStringFromRow( final RowMetaInterface rowMeta, final Object[] row, final int index,
                                   final boolean failOnParseError ) throws KettleException {
    String string = null;
    Exception exc = null;
    try {
      string = rowMeta.getString( row, index );
    } catch ( final Exception e ) {
      exc = e;
    }

    // if 'failOnParseError' is true, and we caught an exception, we either re-throw the exception, or wrap its as a
    // KettleException, if it isn't one already
    if ( failOnParseError ) {
      if ( exc instanceof KettleException ) {
        throw (KettleException) exc;
      } else if ( exc != null ) {
        throw new KettleException( exc );
      }
    }

    // if 'failOnParseError' is false, or there is no exception otherwise, we get the string value straight from the row
    // object
    if ( string == null ) {
      if ( ( row.length <= index ) && failOnParseError ) {
        throw new KettleException( new NullPointerException() );
      }
      string = row.length <= index || row[ index ] == null ? null : row[ index ].toString();
    }

    return string;
  }

  /**
   * Creates a buffered input stream reader for the given CSV input metadata and input stream.
   *

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