It's not boilerplate. It's part of the contract of using the code underneath - Potential error-states are part of the prototype and you have to deal with that just as much as you have to deal with the fact that argument 2 is a String.

Don't want to? Throw it on up the stack, but do so in the knowledge that your program will fall over at the first problem.

And even that is better than carrying on with (for example) a null that then trips up some random bit of code later.